And I'm trying to build something that's optimized for the future devices, and when you're building something from scratch you have freedom to make a choice, and I think JSON makes a lot of sense going forward, since this is just the beginning of this project.
Hope this makes sense!
And all computers and devices made in the last century have no problem dealing with XML, HTML, JS over the wire - in fact this is exactly what web browsers have been doing. So even though you're dealing with native iOS apps and not webpages, that doesn't mean you can't use a similar XML format(or any other document markup language) along with a proper scripting language. And if you insist on staying close to JSON, you could go an all JS approach and use JS(instead of JSON) to describe your views, and also be able to embed JS computations - this is exactly what React does, and does very well.
And again, JSON is not a document markup language, so optimizing it for displaying documents/interfaces seems futile when you can just use XML and save yourself and the interpreter some pain.
That's not simple. JSON is simple. Yours is two things, JSON is one thing. And a lot of people are responding positively to this, so the author may be on to something. JSON is NOT the best language for full expressiveness, you're absolutely right about that. But it's simple, it's one single syntax (not two), and it feels like "just configuration" even though you're doing the same amount of logic.
> so optimizing it for displaying documents/interfaces seems futile
I mean, this guy did it, didn't he? And it's open source so now you can too.
I'm glad people build new things. This is cool. Maybe it'll catch on, maybe it won't, but I'm glad he used JSON and not XML+JS. We already have phonegap and cocoon for that ;).
It's ugly as hell and always has been. I suspect only Java developers could love such a tedious, verbose thing ;-)
Plus, JSON is really close to YAML/coffeescript/Ruby/python/pug so I can write even less keystrokes and compile to JSON. I'd be really interested to see your interface implemented without the braces and brackets. I bet that would make it extremely approachable to non-programmers.