Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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"My general opinion is that it's extremely hard to reliably use JSON as an interchange format reliably when multiple systems and/or parser implementations are involved."

I suspect one of the reasons that JSON has been so successful is precisely this fuzziness, though. Every language can do something a little slightly different and it'll work at first when you send it to somebody else. You get up and off the ground really quickly, and can fix up issues as you go.

If you try to specify something with a stronger schema right off the bat, I find a number of problems immediately emerge that tend to slow the process down. It may be foreign to programmers on HN who have embraced a strong static type mindset, or dynamic programmers who have learned the hard way that sometimes you need to be more precise about your types, but there's still a lot of programmers out there who will wonder why you're asking them whether this is an int or a float is relevant. I came in to work this morning to an alert system telling me that a field that a particular system has been sending as an integer for a couple of months now over many thousands of pushes, "number of bytes transferred", is apparently capable of being a float once every several thousand times for some reason. There's a lot of programmers who will send a string, or a null, or maybe a float, or maybe it's always an integer, and deeply don't understand why you care what it's getting serialized as.

And that's just an example of some of the issues, not a complete list. Trying to specify with some stronger system moves a lot of these issues up front.

(If your organization has internalized that's just how it has to be done, great! I bet you encountered a lot of these bumps on the way, though.)

This isn't a celebration of JSON per se... this is really a rather cynical take. I don't know that we need to type everything to the n'th degree in the first meeting, but "why can't we just let our dynamically-typed language send this number as a string sometimes?" is definitely something I've had to discuss. (Now, I don't get a lot of resistance per se, but it's something I have to bring up.) I'm not presenting this as a good thing, but as a theory that JSON's success is actually in large part because of its loosey-gooseyness, and not despite it, regardless of how we may feel about it.

I suspect one of the reasons that JSON has been so successful is precisely this fuzziness, though. Every language can do something a little slightly different and it'll work at first when you send it to somebody else. You get up and off the ground really quickly, and can fix up issues as you go.

I agree. Sort of how xhtml never really caught on because it was too strict. I never understood the desire to make things break when it's often less effort to make them work.

Though I think the biggest benefit of JSON is that it is so simple, at least compared to XML. It makes it harder to just dump your internal data structures as is. Which forced people to actually serialize their data. Though with time people have overcomplicated it with objects that have "type" and "value" fields, basically designing their own standard.

* There's a lot of programmers who will send a string, or a null, or maybe a float, or maybe it's always an integer, and deeply don't understand why you care what it's getting serialized as.*

As far as changing the type depending on the situation, I kind of wish that was more common. I like the idea of conveying meaning based on type, but for it to work well it would need more standard types, plus anyone using a static language would be mad at you.

> Though I think the biggest benefit of JSON is that it is so simple

Still, I wish there was an option to insert comments.

> Though I think the biggest benefit of JSON is that it is so simple, at least compared to XML. It makes it harder to just dump your internal data structures as is. Which forced people to actually serialize their data. Though with time people have overcomplicated it with objects that have "type" and "value" fields, basically designing their own standard.

XML is a document language with features like mixed content to represent concepts like subsections of formatted text. IMHO quite a few of XML's failings were in the "data format" crowd being a separate camp, and the two never really pushing for good middle ground.

For the crowd that wanted a common scaffolding for document formats, having the rules between say namespace usage in XHTML vs Docbook-XML would not be a problem. For instance, HTML states you should ignore unrecognized tags and instead just show the text contents.

That all came back to bite hard when the data model people started to try to do canonicalization and document signing.

A "strict" variant of JSON fits on a napkin - basically, reject documents with multiple identical keys in an object, represent native numbers using IEEE double-precision floating point, reject documents which do not meet the grammar.

> Though I think the biggest benefit of JSON is that it is so simple, at least compared to XML.

Or more precisely, that it appears simple at first glance, and that it is very easy to get started with. TFA (or just practical experience trying to build an interoperable JSON-based API) should convince anyone that it is not simple in the long term :).

I'm not convinced. There are a lot less JSON implementatations than JSON users, so we should have been possible to guide implementations with a means of proper specification and test suites. Note that the OP is possibly the first ever complete test suite for JSON after 15 full years. It is not like seeding initial implementations (that can serve as models for future implementors) is particularly hard either; Douglas Crockford himself wrote two implementations in C and JavaScript.

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