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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

> If Crockford's argument was "I got rid of comments because people were using them for preprocessor directives", then he just made the problem a million times worse because now there are a million different, incompatible "preprocessor directives"

No, because his goal was to make JSON a highly-compatible interchange format, which it is! There are roughly zero incompatible preprocessor directives, and roughly zero problems using JSON to exchange data between parties. Seriously, when have you received JSON that you couldn’t immediately parse with your standard JSON parser of preference? The fact that some people might devise their own tools to store incompatible JSON on their end with things like comments, and strip those things out when transmitting them in order to make them compatible JSON, does not qualify as an incompatible preprocessor directive. On the contrary, thats precisely the intent of the choice to not have comments in JSON.

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> Seriously, when have you received JSON that you couldn’t immediately parse with your standard JSON parser of preference?

Every single time for any non-mediocre definition of parsing. JSON has no way to transmit the meaning of values, no datetimes, no units, no sets, nor any other semantic attribute. That means your "parsed" result is always useless and wrong on its own, literally a lesser-dimensional projection of the original information, until you interpret it again in an entirely ad-hoc custom manner. Wouldn't it be nice if you could store instructions inline for how to do that.

JSON schema exist exactly for that reason, hacks like adding type is just nonsense. If somebody need comments, types it - XML has all that. Also how hard is to write {"type": "datetime", "value": "2021-02-23 12:46:37.07"}?

> JSON schema exist exactly for that reason, hacks like adding type is just nonsense

Creating schemas for declaring types is literally a hack for adding type! I think its very bizarre to say "You dont need to do X because you can just do X."

> Also how hard is to write {"type": "datetime", "value": "2021-02-23 12:46:37.07"}

"datetime" isn't a universal format specification. 2021-01-10 could be October 1 or January 10. What time zone is this in? Local to the sender, UTC, local to the recipient, somewhere else? Is this a 24 hour clock or something that gets a modifier for the other half of the day? You're making some classic mistakes that people make when they don't think about the complexity of the problem domain of communicating information unambiguously.

> Creating schemas for declaring types is literally a hack for adding type!

It is a "communication protocol" - base of any messaging system. Message has header with protocol name and version: HTTP, TCP, DB connection, SOAP, any message queue - everything working that way.

> "datetime" isn't a universal format specification. than use another (see the comment above)

self-contained message is anti-pattern

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