Meme transcription:
Panel 1: Bilbo Baggins ponders, “After all… why should I care about the difference between int and String?
Panel 2: Bilbo Baggins is revealed to be an API developer. He continues, “JSON is always String, anyways…”
json doesn’t have ints, it has Numbers, which are ieee754 floats. if you want to precisely store the full range of a 64 bit int (anything larger than 2^53 -1) then string is indeed the correct type
json doesn’t have ints, it has Numbers, which are ieee754 floats.
No. numbers in JSON have arbitrary precision. The standard only specifies that implementations may impose restrictions on the allowed values.
This specification allows implementations to set limits on the range and precision of numbers accepted. Since software that implements IEEE 754 binary64 (double precision) numbers [IEEE754] is generally available and widely used, good interoperability can be achieved by implementations that expect no more precision or range than these provide, in the sense that implementations will approximate JSON numbers within the expected precision. A JSON number such as 1E400 or 3.141592653589793238462643383279 may indicate potential interoperability problems, since it suggests that the software that created it expects receiving software to have greater capabilities for numeric magnitude and precision than is widely available.
Explicit types are just laziness, you should be catching exceptions anyways.
These JSON memes got me feeing like some junior dev out there is upset because they haven’t read and understood the docs.
It’s the API’s job to validate it either way. As it does that job, it may as well parse the string as an integer.
CBOR for life, down with JSON.
If there are no humans in the loop, sure, like for data transfer. But for, e.g., configuration files, i’d prefer a text-based solution instead of a binary one, JSON is a nice fit.
Yaml is more human readable/editable, and it’s a superset of json!
Yaml is just arcane bullshit to actually write as a human. Nor is it intuitively clear how yaml serializes.
Until someone cannot tell the difference between tab and space when configuring or you miss one indentation. Seriously, whoever thinks indentation should have semantic meaning for computers should burn in hell. Indentation is for us, humans, not computers. You can write a JSON with or without indentation if you want. Also, use JSON5 to have comments and other good stuff for a config file.
Hell, no. If I wanted to save bytes, I’d use a binary format, or just fucking zip the JSON. Looking at a request-response pair and quickly understanding the transferred data is invaluable.
“1” + “1”
“11”
