1. So what if JSON is primarily used for data interchange? It's not like allowing comments would somehow make them magically show up on serialized objects. This objection makes 0 sense to me. And heck, tons of other serialization formats (e.g. XML) support comments. Besides, there is a big reason that human-readable serialization formats are so popular - because they're human readable! If you're really worried about size you should be using a binary format anyway.

2. "Rigid rulesets" has nothing to do with Crockford's arguments. It's one thing to prefer a particular type system, or limit functionality if you think it has high potential for misuse. By JSON not having comments all you end up with is worse workarounds, like putting comments in object keys.

3. "I'm not even sure why someone would want to write comments in package.json" To be blunt, then, I can't believe you've ever written any code in a business (i.e. with multiple developers) in the Node/NPM ecosystem. Is it really that hard to wonder why someone would want to comment why they added a particular dependency to their project? The lack of comments in package.json is one of the biggest complaints of this format, and it's certainly not just me, e.g. https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4482 and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14221579/how-do-i-add-co...

Well then you and plenty of other people have some wrong ideas about package.json. That isn't surprising.

package.json gets rewritten for all kinds of things, which is not really compatible with adding comments wherever you want. Adding "why this dependency is here" comments may seem like a good idea to add to package.json, but you're kind of missing the point. If you need that level of documentation, trying to shoehorn it into package.json is just the wrong place for it. Soon enough your package.json looks like a graffiti wall.

>To be blunt, then, I can't believe you've ever written any code in a business (i.e. with multiple developers) in the Node/NPM ecosystem.

Then you'll be astonished that I have been working with nodejs for about 14 years professionally. Sure I have wanted to put comments into package.json, but I was naive and now I'm fine not doing that. I haven't wanted to in many years. I document things in other ways and it has served us all very well. YMMV.

Either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

So the right place is to make a graffiti out of another place, instead of in the place where people actually declare the dependencies?

I find it bizarre when people believe in one true way of doing things. I mean, you can declare your dependencies how you like, but if others do it differently, then they're clueless?

Surely that's what the commit message is for? I mean, I get that it's more convenient to have the comment right there in the file, but that should be balanced against the downsides: having to maintain the comment, making the file larger and more awkward to read, etc.

Yes, I still think a commit message is important, but it absolutely does not take the place of a comment. Suppose you'd like to do something like this:

    // DO NOT change to latest version. MUST pin to version 1.2.3 because
    // 1.2.4 includes a subtle bug that doesn't work with our version of
    // the zed library. We have an open issue on zed, see
    // https://github.com/zed/zed/issues/1234.
    // Once that is fixed, we can upgrade.
    "foobar": "1.2.3"

I simply cannot think of another file format that is used for configs that doesn't support comments.

I never suggested using a commit message, there are plenty of other ways to document these things and I'll leave that up to the user to figure out.

So now you've written this tome of a comment in package.json. What happens the next time someone installs a package using npm install? package.json gets rewritten, that's what. Your comment will be gone. I suppose you expect npm to somehow use AI to guess at how to rewrite package.json so it can put your comments in the correct places??

And expecting someone to read package.json before updating or installing a library is just as useful as putting it in a commit message. If you really need to be careful about dependency versioning, you better have more safeguards in place than just a comment in package.json.

>I simply cannot think of another file format that is used for configs that doesn't support comments.

I mostly see configs created as .js or .ts files, where comments are allowed. Not package.json. Never package.json, because package.json is guaranteed to be rewritten regularly. But maybe you missed that part of your bootcamp class? Yes, .js files can be used as "config". It's been done in plenty of projects. It isn't the end of the world. JSON also isn't solely used for configs or data that needs comments, in fact the majority of use cases in the world for JSON won't need any comments at all so writing comments in package.json is kind of an edge-case.

>I simply cannot think of another file format that is used for configs that doesn't support comments.

JSON isn't only a config file format. It's primary use is data transfer.

Dude, I think you're lost, in more ways than one. I was directly responding to a comment that stated "Surely that's what the commit message is for?"

For the rest of your comment, at this point I'd rather have an argument with a dining room table. No shit you can't have comments in package.json now, that's the entire reason that issue https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4482 is unfixable. If JSON supported comments from the beginning, then tooling would have to respect that, just like the bajillion other config file formats that support tooling that updates the config file programmatically.