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Comment by fruchtose | Hacker News Reader

The difficulty level is hardly extreme. It is not an unreasonable challenge to learn that writing an array of elements requires opening and closing brackets.

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The issue here might be that JSON has become widely used for two things:

   Data marshalling/transfer
   Config formats

For the latter, as they are typically written by hand, it's not particularly appropriate as the syntax is noisy and multiple nesting with brackets tends to lead to errors, even if you understand it perfectly well in principle, and of course there are no comments, no datetimes etc.

I imagine this is intended as a saner version of YAML for configs.

FWIW I've also recognized the problem and wrote and implemented my own configuration syntax, which makes the aforementioned JSON data look like:

[because=[[80=percent][of=JSON;is=brackets]]]

The implementation, which is in Haxe and has an informal spec in comments, can be seen here: https://github.com/triplefox/triad/blob/master/dev/com/ludam...

I didn't view bracketing as the enemy(which seems to be the focus of a lot of config syntaxes) but rather the combination of multiple types of bracketing, plus start-and-stop usage of shift keying. I only have two types of brackets, the sequence [ type and the long string {" type, and you can "feel" when you're writing a long string because of that sudden need to use the shift.

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