Why not JSON?

aaronparecki.com

11 points·webhat··5 comments

You can't make decisions today about what will be the standard in 10 years. Computers will be exponentially faster and used for different things. It's just pointless.

JSON is widely accepted now, and BSON overcomes its only real shortcoming (lack of binary support).

There's nearly 0% chance any of your software (or any of ours) will still be used/maintained in 10 years, so make a decision about what's available now.

You can't make decisions about what will be standard in 10 years, however don't disregard the chance your software will be around in 10 years time.

I had a number of packages, written in 1998-1999 maintained in debian stable between 2000 and 2010, they were eventually dropped because they didn't work anymore after a big revisions in the parent project.

In this particular case, he's also talking about a simple storage format.

In popular languages, switching between simple formats like JSON/YAML should be a two-line change (the line where you serialize and the line where you unserialize). XML may be more tricky, but XML sucks and no one should be using it anyway.

He's talking about specs (indieauth and micropub) rather than a storage format, so it will not be trivial to change from one format to another in the future.

I am a bit confused as to why one would need regex literals, doesn't that get fairly nicely represented in just strings? (sans the fun with escapes)

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