Why JSON?
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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Oh my god... that's JSON Bourne
Ded
imagine doing web development for a living and calling yourself a 'coder.'
you're writing instructions for a web browser, not a computer, pal. you fear the computer and it's language the same way you fear a black man from the islands when you venture through a bad neighborhood.
there isn't even a proper analogy for vibe coding because it's so lame. imagine showing up to a jazz club and wanting to sit with a band but all you brought was your laptop with suno but everyone else is playing a real instrument.
are you a musician?
TBF most of it is JavaScript which is actually code, but they shouldn't be called coders for another reason.
What is web development if not coding? You write specially formatted text in a file with a particular extension and another program that knows how to read it makes the computer do things.
alternative scenerio:
Guy: "it turns javascript objects into texts in json format"
Soldier: "He uses javascript, shoot the poor bastard"
Alternative scenario:
Soldier B: Soldier A asked a JavaScript question instead of a software engineering question. He's not a real soldier, shoot him
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(1 replies)
i've designed my own communication protocols that run directly on udp. i couldn't tell you either.
Ima guess it's javascript-ese to turn a json object into a string, perhaps for serialization. But no clue, coding for decades but always hated js, I guess my way through with a linter and IDE when I absolutely, positively, cannot find an alternative, which seldom happens.
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Not sure every software engineer needs to know this. If they'd said web developer I suppose this would really be expected knowledge, but then you'd probably want to shoot them anyway.
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TypeError: JSON.stringfy is not a function
of course MIT uses their own JSON primitives
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I have worked with JSON very often and do not know, what 'Stringify' is. Reading it for the first time. Does it... convert anything to strings?
Looked it up:
The JSON.stringify() Method
The JSON.stringify() method converts a JavaScript value into JSON text.
https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_json_stringify.asp
Okay JavaScript. Never worked with JS before.
Also, didn't knew web devs are considered 'software engineers' now. /j
How is it that you worked with JSON very often and don't know that it stands for JavaScript Object Notation or what stringify does?
I use it as a format for, e.g., config files or for serializing data in a human readable format. Mainly from C++, sometimes from Python or C#.
Never in these years did I stumble over stringify.
Cause json has become ubiquitous in a lot of other contexts. Heck on a ton of Cisco NXOS implementations you can even pipe output to json in the cli. It's also used in a shitload of application configurations now instead of a flat .conf file too. In fact when I really think about it, I haven't touched JS in a long freaking time (like years), but have probably touch json at least once a week. I just don't find it that far fetched that someone would be working with json daily and be incredibly divorced from it's original implementation.
But they keep implying they are software engineers using JSON in a development capacity... I'd understand a system admin updating a config file to only be familiar with the syntax, but if you're consuming JSON in your code you either understand the spec enough to implement it, or you didn't write that code...
Something rubbed me wrong about not knowing what JSON is and insulting web developers as not real software engineers in the same breath.
They didn’t say they don’t know what it stands for.
They don’t work with JavaScript. I don’t deal with JS very often at all. I do know stringify, since I did a bunch of JS stuff back in the 2010s. But it’s not unreasonable for a dev to not know JS.
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Ugh, terrible memory unlocked.
I asked someone a similar question in an interview once. They weren't doing well and I wanted to end on a positive at least. I asked them to make a dict in python and for extra credit, turn it into a string using whatever library or method they want.
This was not for a junior position.
5 minutes of for loop insanity later they disconnected crying. I always felt bad for that guy.
when i last did interviews we didn't do live coding, but chatted to applicants about things they liked about their preferred language (this was a consultancy position). people who actually like to program tend to have loads of opinions. juniors moreso. the less engaged people were with those questions, the worse the solution the their take-home task tended to be.
a friend of mine interviewed a candidate who apparently visibly froze after every question, like it was a quiz. turns out they were being fed answers from people off-screen and those people hadn't expected casual conversation. they were found out when they forgot to mute.
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cat = dict(name=‘Garfield’, color=‘orange’)
str(cat)
Can I have that job?
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Ah, I see where he went wrong. The correct answer was "JavaScript? Ew."
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"What does JWT stand for?"
"That's easy. JWT tokens are..."
"Shoot him."
Huh, this made me realize all these years that I've been pronouncing it as "jay-sawn." Is it really pronounced like "Jason?"
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