I don’t know of a single person that struggles to read/write json, there is a clear winner.
Really? Any JSON over 80 chars becomes a nightmare to read for me, especially if indention is not used to make it more readable.
Comment on Show me a better text format for serializing
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Serializing? For serializing you probably want performance above all else. I’m saying this without checking any benchmark, but I’m sure yaml is more expensive to parse than other formats where indentation don’t have meaning.
For human readability: it has to be readable (and writeable) by all humans. I know (a lot of people) that dislike yaml, toml and XML. I don’t know of a single person that struggles to read/write json, there is a clear winner.
kool_newt@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 months ago
I don’t know why we’re fucking about trying to use text editors to manipulate structured data.
Yeah, it’s convenient to just be able to use a basic text editor, but we’re not trying to cram it all on a floppy disk here. I’m sure we could have a nice structured data editor somewhere for all those XML, JSON and YAML files we’re supposed to maintain every day.
kogasa@programming.dev 11 months ago
Serializing isn’t necessarily about performance, or we’d just use protobuf or similar. I agree Json is a great all rounder. Combine with JSON object schema to define sophisticated DSLs that are still readable, plain JSON. TOML is nice as a configuration language, but its main appeal (readability) suffers when applied to complex modeling tasks. XML is quite verbose and maybe takes the “custom DSL” idea a little too far. YAML is a mistake.
DrM@feddit.de 11 months ago
JSON would be perfect if it allowed for comments. But it doesn’t and that alone is enough for me to prefer YAML over JSON. Yes, JSON is understandable without any learning curve, but having a learning curve is not always bad. YAML provides a major benefit that is worth the learning curve and doesn’t have the issues that XML has (which is that there is no way to understand an XML without also having the XSD for it)
Michal@programming.dev 11 months ago
Json should also allow for trailing commas. There’s no reason for it not too. It’s annoying having to maintain commas.
DerArzt@lemmy.world 11 months ago
And also a standard date time type!
frezik@midwest.social 11 months ago
JSON5 has comments, among a few other shortsighted limitations of the original.
kogasa@programming.dev 11 months ago
If a comment isn’t part of the semantic content of a JSON object it has no business being there. JSON models data, it’s not markup language for writing config files.
You can use comments in JSON schema (in a standardized way) when they are semantically relevant: json-schema.org/…/comments
For the data interchange format, comments aren’t part of the JSON grammar but the option to parse non-JSON values is left open to the implementation. Many implementations do detect (and ignore) comments indicated by e.g. # or //.
frezik@midwest.social 11 months ago
JavaScript package management promptly said otherwise. JSON is a config format no matter if you like it or not.
kogasa@programming.dev 11 months ago
I’ve disagreed with JavaScript before, what makes you think I won’t do it again?
Anyway, anything using JSON as a config language will also certainly use a JSON interpreter that can ignore comments. Sure that’s “implementation specific,” but so is a config file. You wouldn’t use “MyApplication.config.json” outside the context of MyApplication loading its own configuration, so there’s no need for it to be strictly compliant JSON as long as it plays nicely with most text editors.