Do you deal with the serialized JSON text directly, or run JSON.parse() and JSON.stringify() to turn your JSON into objects?

Do you ever use regular expressions to parse unstructured text when using a Unix shell? Do you think 'grep' and thinking of a regex is more or less efficient that using 'where'?

"or run JSON.parse() and JSON.stringify() to turn your JSON into objects?"

By that time, the communication has already happened.

Exactly. His point is that whatever operations you perform from that point on is on the object and not the string that was used to represent the object as it was being communicated. The string is just an intermediate representation. It's the object that's relevant to your business logic.

Well the only point of serialising was communication, so I'd argue unwrapping a presentation layer format is included as part of communication.

Fair enough. I was coming at this from my current experience where a couple of different programs I have grab JSON from a server: the Python one puts it into an object, the bash script doesn't because I couldn't be bothered :)

JSON is not a textual format. What it is, is right there in the name: It's an Object Notation. Now, JSON objects are most frequently serialized to text, but they are still objects. The format is an orthogonal matter.

Let me cite you json.org:

> JSON is a text format

json.org is owned by Douglas Crockford, who should know what JSON is, since he was the first to specify that format.

Agreed, but nobody uses it without parsing it. You're not grepping JSON, you're JSON.parse() ing it.

Why does it matter whether the exchange format is a regular or a context-free language? It is a textual representation of binary data either way.

Sure, it is harder to pattern-match context-free, and we have a convenient syntax for textual regular languages, but we create tools such as jq so that we can pipe JSON and extract data.

The "notation" part is the serialization. JSON is a "system of written symbols used to represent" objects.