Meme transcription:

Panel 1: Bilbo Baggins ponders, “After all… why should I care about the difference between int and String?

Panel 2: Bilbo Baggins is revealed to be an API developer. He continues, “JSON is always String, anyways…”

  • andyburke@fedia.io
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    9 months ago

    These JSON memes got me feeing like some junior dev out there is upset because they haven’t read and understood the docs.

  • brian@programming.dev
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    9 months ago

    json doesn’t have ints, it has Numbers, which are ieee754 floats. if you want to precisely store the full range of a 64 bit int (anything larger than 2^53 -1) then string is indeed the correct type

    • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzOP
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      9 months ago

      json doesn’t have ints, it has Numbers, which are ieee754 floats.

      No. numbers in JSON have arbitrary precision. The standard only specifies that implementations may impose restrictions on the allowed values.

      This specification allows implementations to set limits on the range and precision of numbers accepted. Since software that implements IEEE 754 binary64 (double precision) numbers [IEEE754] is generally available and widely used, good interoperability can be achieved by implementations that expect no more precision or range than these provide, in the sense that implementations will approximate JSON numbers within the expected precision. A JSON number such as 1E400 or 3.141592653589793238462643383279 may indicate potential interoperability problems, since it suggests that the software that created it expects receiving software to have greater capabilities for numeric magnitude and precision than is widely available.

      https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8259.html#section-6

    • 0x0@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      If there are no humans in the loop, sure, like for data transfer. But for, e.g., configuration files, i’d prefer a text-based solution instead of a binary one, JSON is a nice fit.

        • bitfucker@programming.dev
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          9 months ago

          Until someone cannot tell the difference between tab and space when configuring or you miss one indentation. Seriously, whoever thinks indentation should have semantic meaning for computers should burn in hell. Indentation is for us, humans, not computers. You can write a JSON with or without indentation if you want. Also, use JSON5 to have comments and other good stuff for a config file.

        • bob_lemon@feddit.org
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          9 months ago

          Yaml is just arcane bullshit to actually write as a human. Nor is it intuitively clear how yaml serializes.

    • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzOP
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      9 months ago

      Hell, no. If I wanted to save bytes, I’d use a binary format, or just fucking zip the JSON. Looking at a request-response pair and quickly understanding the transferred data is invaluable.

  • RustyNova@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    To whoever does that, I hope that there is a special place in hell where they force you to do type safe API bindings for a JSON API, and every time you use the wrong type for a value, they cave your skull in.

    Sincerely, a frustrated Rust dev

    • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      “Hey, it appears to be int most of the time except that one time it has letters.”

      throws keyboard in trash

    • Rednax@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      The worst thing is: you can’t even put an int in a json file. Only doubles. For most people that is fine, since a double can function as a 32 bit int. But not when you are using 64 bit identifiers or timestamps.

      • Ethan@programming.dev
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        9 months ago

        That’s an artifact of JavaScript, not JSON. The JSON spec states that numbers are a sequence of digits with up to one decimal point. Implementations are not obligated to decode numbers as floating point. Go will happily decode into a 64-bit int, or into an arbitrary precision number.