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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

JSON is serviceable as an intermediate format, machine-generated and machine-consumed.

It is outright bad as a human-operated format. It explicitly lacks comments, it does not allow trailing commas, it lacks namespaces, to name a few pain points.

YAML is much more human-friendly, with all its problems.

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I often hear the “comments aren’t supported” argument against JSON, but as a daily consumer, creator, and maintainer of JSON, I honestly can’t recall ever _really_ needing comments in JSON. It tends to be somewhat self documenting in my experience.

A config file without comments can mean serious annoyance.

If JSON was developed more recently on places like GitHub, it would never have ended up like that with that many deficiencies.

When maintaining a JSON file, did you ever happen to wonder why a particular value is what it is?

This is where comments belong.

If it's that important and complex, have an accompanying README that lists line numbers and comments.

Lesson to learn: Nobody reads the docs.

This is such a dumb aphorism. I read and create docs every single day.

If the comments are so critical that it is a problem, then an accompanying file with those comments would be used. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of crocodile tears.

Good idea! And then put a comment into the configuration file that refers to where the documentation is.. ah, f__k!

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