However, something I’ve come to learn is that some ideas I thought were bad were actually not bad. They were poorly executed and the exact reasoning why they did not work well in a given application was not well-understood.
So I can see an argument for “this was horrible back when it was done in the early 2000s” simultaneously with “this could actually still be a good idea for some use cases.”
I realize that people need to make decisions based on their personal experience, and I don’t have a good rule-of-thumb for when to try a variation of a “bad” idea.
Sometimes you need the BFH to get to the elegant solution.
In nature, species populations compete with each other and are kept in a dynamic equilibrium. If population size of a species increases, then its predators will have more opportunities to predate, and their population size increases as well. This leads to more predation pressure, which should negate the population increase and decreases opportunities for predators as well. "Predators" is to be understood in a very general way. It can also apply to fungi and other microbial forms of life.
Changes to this equilibrium arise when prey species evolve to resist the predation pressure by predators. And vice versa if the predators improve. Then, ecosystems change, and these changes can be very disruptive.
Agriculture is a rebellion against this dynamic equilibrium because it creates irresistible opportunities for predators. They have to be held in check either by brute force (hunting, pesticides, containment) or by hacking the ecosystem (for lack of a better term) to ensure that helpful predators are around. The former is probably unsustainable in the long term as it is not at all clear that we will forever be able to outsmart the evolutionary potential of predator species. The latter is difficult as well.
Apart from predation, the other challenge to agriculture is that it depletes the soil in the long term. Fertile soil arises as a result of a ecosystem where the decomposers cannot keep up. Most forms of agriculture interrupt such ecosystems and thus deplete the soil in various ways.
To keep this in check, different methods were evolved, such as slash-and-burn, crop rotation and artificial fertilization. But it is not at all sure that we will always be able to stop depletion of our soils just in time to prevent civilizational collapse. Currently, availability of phosphorus is a looming danger because most of it is mined. Once we hit peak phosphorus, we better have solutions in place to get it from somewhere else.
For people who've spent a lot of time with ANT, you might be familiar with this article from its creator: https://web.archive.org/web/20041217023752///x180.net/Journa...
It was possible and even made sense to use XML as the format for a build tool, however, it got stretched way to far. The idea was applied in use cases that were less and less appropraite, as a result years later you end up with something that is unwieldy and doesn't make sense and, generally, thought of as "terrible".
There are use cases were JsonLogic might make a lot of sense, and for those that is great.
Generally, I'm sceptical as there is high risk of increasing couplings in a way that will make change much harder. This will be particularly true if it is applied to use cases that don't truly warrent this kind of solution.
I don't see why serializing close to JSON is any worse than doin so to, say, S-expressions, or Algol-style syntax, or WASM.
If you aren't manually coding it, but generating it, the capabilities matter, the syntax matters a lot less.
But what reasons and are they relevant to this use? For instance, I can think of one really good reason (actually several different ones justifying different formats getting used depending on the actual use case, but they can all be summarized the same way when it comes to not using JSON): Shipping an AST between endpoints one of which is a web page and therefore has JSON as its best supported generic object serialization format isn’t the use case.
Or do you think we are at our peak?
You mean like every single idea/project/etc that ever existed before their invention?
From now on, when someone tells me something is a bad idea, I'll take it mean that I should examine it further.