Hacker News Reader

Comment by eknkc | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the comments are the only important part. I’d rather not have single quoted strings or unquoted identifiers to be honest. Trailing commas are nice to have though.

All I miss in JSON are comments and a native datetime type. Everything else, I’m fine with.

View on HN

Strongly disagree about datetimes; they exist at a different semantic level and are entirely too easy to get wrong.

Not more than a string representing a date that gets interpreted after json.parse.

Luckily, we have decades of experience in e.g. SQL, and existing and well-polished ISO specs on dates that can just be used as is without reinventing the wheel.

Yeah, but OmegaStar still doesn't support ISO timestamps like they said they would a month ago!

(Reference: https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ)

As if anyone actually implements ISO 8901 correctly.

JavaScript certainly doesn't.

JS at least implements a strict subset of it for UTC, which is still a useful starting point.

I mean, floating point numbers are easy to get wrong. And why care about semantics? This is a data transfer format, it should be able to represent data that is being transferred gazillion times a day.

Make it raw ISO 8601 { "created_at": 2024-12-10T11:20:07Z } and do not accept any other format. I know there are way smarter people than me who can figure this out at this point.

DateTimes are the number 1 reason I can not use JSON data as is (if I simply parse it into a dynamic object like JSON.parse).

For comments, adding "_comment": "..." fields can work pretty well.

Not where the reader verifies the schema. And not when you want to write a long multiline comment. (Unless you want _comment1, _comment2, ...)

An array of strings works well here! Also, you can always preprocess to remove comments before validating!

If you're preprocessing, you might as well just `grep -v ^#` and support 'real' comments.

There's power to it being valid JSON, though; it can be stored in databases optimized for JSON payloads, and edited with JSON editors. There's a real agility to liberally sprinkling JSONFields and JSON code editors across an auto-generated admin interface like the Django admin system, knowing that you can leave breadcrumbs for colleagues, and that anything starting with a `__` is fair game for comments any time you see such a key name.

IMO it would be great if fields could have annotations for types that fall back as strings. Datetimes could be annotated for easier parsing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com