That attitude is misguided. Many people do in fact use JSON as a config file format, so it is a config file format. Real world usage outweighs prescriptions about what is and isn’t correct.
Looking at the first standardized JSON spec, it’s not particularly prescriptive about usage, simply saying:
JSON is syntax of braces, brackets, colons, and commas that is useful in many contexts, profiles, and applications.
Of course, it would be a better config file format if it supported comments, but people use it even despite that. I think we should try to understand the reasons for that rather than just telling people they’re doing it wrong.
JSON is one of the worst config formats, even worse than the Apache or nginx config formats. Not being able to simply comment out a config line temporarily for testing purposes or to leave a explanatory comment for special setting is simply bad.
Still, everyone forgets HOCON [1] is a thing, which solves many of the problems expressed here about JSON -for configuration-. It's easy to clearly specify things like time, reference other parts of the config, or if you want to change just one value, you can add that to the 'end' of the HOCON file and be GTG.
[1] - https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/master/HOCON.md
Skimming through it, concatenation of unquoted values is where it goes off the rails for me. This is quite the gotcha: https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/master/HOCON.md#not...
My wishlist for a friendlier JSON would be, in priority order:
- Allow trailing commas
- Comments
- Allow newlines instead of commas
- Allow unquoted dictionary keys
And I think that’s it. I’m not even sure the last one is worth the extra complexity.
I don't know why people would prefer that over YAML or others but at least you can actually add comments in them and the reason for their popularity doesn't seem to be baked in parser support because these tools are adding their additional "JSON" parsing anyway.
...and those people need to face the consequences of their poor and missguided technical decisions.
In this day and age we have no excuse to repeat the "but everyone is using XML for that" mistake. Just pick the right tool for the job and stop complainig that the tool needs to change to compensate for your poor judgement.
If you want comments, pipe it through json5 first or something. VSCode again supports comments as a courtesy. More tools that use JSON are starting to as well.
It's just not a big deal.
That's just tooling compensating for the shortcomings of a format being shoehorned into a use-case that falls outside of it's scope.
It's the XML nonsense all over again.
> It's better done and more mainstream than any other solution I've seen compared to people saying "well technically you could build that for <pet format>."
That's the same short-sighted line of argument that was used to force the mistake of using XML everywhere.
There are right tools for the right job. JSON os the right tool for a lot of jobs, but config files is not one of them.
Even though it’s not ideal, I actively prefer JSON over every other random format I’ve come across. This is speaking as somebody who mostly has to tweak existing configs, rather than extending them or writing new ones.
YAML (along with I guess TOML etc) looks nice at first glance, but it has too many weird syntax shortcuts that make it hard to figure out what’s actually going on. And googling for syntax like “[ ]” is hard!
With JSON, the data model is super simple, and for a given set of data there’s only one way to write it down. Sometimes the data model is too simple, sure. But even for fiddly cases like dates and times, there’s often an obvious solution (in this case, ISO 8601 strings).
You have to look at JSON in a historical context to understand it. It exists so that someone could get some data into their Javascript program with "eval". It was then standardized so that you didn't need a full Javascript engine to understand it, because Python and Perl and Ruby didn't have one, and it turned out that evalling random data from the Internet was a security disaster. Does that make it a good human-readable config file? Nope. Does that make it a good interface definition language? Nope.
It exists because it got popular early, and now we're stuck with it. Now it's too late to apply band-aids to make it a human-readable config language or a good computer-to-computer interchange format, because you will always have old parsers around and people will naturally want to target those. Trust me, 99% of developers will moan when you tell them that they have to use GRPC+Protos to access your API. They will be equally mad about your JSON extension that has comments and integers in it, because the dialect of Brainfuck they use for all their projects doesn't have a library that supports those extensions and their editor can't syntax-highlight it or autoformat it.
I would like to give you a solution to this problem, but there isn't one. JSON "won", but it's bad at everything except being well-understood. That seems to be all that people really care about.
I call BS.
As a counterexample search for the word "comment" in https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html. Or are you saying that http is not a computer-to-computer interchange format?
It turns out these "comments" were a disaster and user agents are moving away from even providing them. You put "firefox" in the user-agent header, and web servers would read the comment and send you "your browser doesn't work" instead of the actual document. That did not make for a very compatible web... turns out comments in machine-to-machine communication are a bad idea.
How about ".comment" sections in ELF binaries, do they count?
But that doesn't change the fact that people put comments into machine protocols.
For another example, lots of machine to machine protocols specify XML. Such as SOAP. They therefore all support comments.
In accord to the general trend, eventually they get abused into having a semantic meaning. For example https://support.ptc.com/help/windchill/wc111_hc/whc_en/index... shows how one system uses comments in SOAP to create documentation and a WSDL that lets interfaces to your code to be automatically generated.
And so comments eventually become executable. But that doesn't change the fact that comments can exist in machine to machine formats.
Do we use the same Json me and you?
> Json is an open standard file format, and data interchange format, that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON
Json is text based, and meant for storage and transmission in a human readable format.
The problem with JSON is that it's just human-readable enough that people think it's a config file format. It's not.