"Why would you care what order we were sending the name value pairs for this?" The article makes it sound like it's somehow IBM's fault. However, questions about preserving order in hashes/associative arrays/maps/whatchamacallit span at least thirty years. Some applications of the format even demand it (e.g. ansible uses YAML - a superset of JSON - or even straight JSON for it playbooks; emitting them out of order is not an option).

Every time the issue surfaces it elicits a large amount of eye rolling among the cognoscenti. However, I'm a firm believer in the idea that recurring demands from the user base need to be addressed, rather then mocked. The coding community appears to me notably tone deaf on this.

'Course anybody can use <insert suitable technique> to send a JSON map in the desired order, except the parser on the other hand will blissfully disregard it. Or you can devise any ordered solution on both ends, which will leave you outside of the accepted standard and open you up to the situation described in the article (where the requirement may well have been frivolous).

I can remember very few - if any - instances of somebody implying that the standard should somehow make room for this kind of scenarios. The standard reply was "use a different format" or "change the requirement". (Somehow remembers me of people asking what can one do to have whitespace-preserving XML, and at least one amusing story about that)