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…”
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
“Hey, it appears to be int most of the time except that one time it has letters.”
throws keyboard in trash
This man has interacted with SAP.
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.
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.
What that means is that you cannot rely on numbers in JSON. Just use strings.
Unless you’re dealing with some insanely flexible schema, you should be able to know what kind of number (int, double, and so on) a field should contain when deserializing a number field in JSON. Using a string does not provide any benefits here unless there’s some big in your deserialzation process.
What’s the point of your schema if the receiving end is JavaScript, for example? You can convert a string to BigNumber, but you’ll get wrong data if you’re sending a number.
What makes you think so?
const bigJSON = '{"gross_gdp": 12345678901234567890}'; JSON.parse(bigJSON, (key, value, context) => { if (key === "gross_gdp") { // Ignore the value because it has already lost precision return BigInt(context.source); } return value; }); > {gross_gdp: 12345678901234567890n}https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/JSON/parse
Because no one is using JSON.parse directly. Do you guys even code?
I’m not following your point so I think I might be misunderstanding it. If the types of numbers you want to express are literally incapable of being expressed using JSON numbers then yes, you should absolutely use string (or maybe even an object of multiple fields).
The point is that everything is expressable as JSON numbers, it’s when those numbers are read by JS there’s an issue
Relax, it’s just JSON. If you wanted to not be stringly-typed, you’d have not used JSON.
(though to be fair, I hate it when people do bullshit types, but they got a point in that you ought to not use JSON in the first place if it matters)
As if I had a choice. Most of the time I’m only on the receiving end, not the sending end. I can’t just magically use something else when that something else doesn’t exist.
Heck, even when I’m on the sending end, I’d use JSON. Just not bullshit ones. It’s not complicated to only have static types, or having discriminant fields
Well, apart from float numbers and booleans, all other types can only be represented by a string in JSON. Date with timezone? String. BigNumber/Decimal? String. Enum? String. Everything is a string in JSON, so why bother?
I got nothing against other types. Just numbers/misleading types.
Although, enum variants shall have a label field for identification if they aren’t automatically inferable.
Well, the issue is that JSON is based on JS types, but other languages can interpret the values in different ways. For example, Rust can interpret a number as a 64 bit int, but JS will always interpret a number as a double. So you cannot rely on numbers to represent data correctly between systems you don’t control or systems written in different languages.
No problem with strings in JSON, until some smart developer you get JSONs from decides to interchangeably use String and number, and maybe a boolean (but only
false) to show that the value is not set, and of coursenullfor a missing value that was supposed to be optional all along but go figure that it was
These JSON memes got me feeing like some junior dev out there is upset because they haven’t read and understood the docs.
"true"You guys have docs?
The code is my bible.
The schema is this SQL statement
Yes, I know the field isn’t nullable in the database. I’m asking you what you are sending me, jack——
(Directed at a colleague)
This isn’t even an issue of middle ware sometimes. It’s just… Knowing the DB. And I rather not spend time learning when you can just make docs
You guys can read?
Comments? Comments? Who needs comments?
I’ll have you know all of my code is stringly typed.
All my binary code is stringy too.
CBOR for life, down with JSON.
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.
Yaml is more human readable/editable, and it’s a superset of json!
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.
Yaml is just arcane bullshit to actually write as a human. Nor is it intuitively clear how yaml serializes.
Yaml is cancer.
It’s entirely disingenuous because who the hell is throwing JSON into YAML without converting it? Oh wow, I changed the file extension and it still works. I’m so glad we changed to YAML!
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.
If you’re moving away from text formats, might as well use a proper serialisation tool like protobuf…
Yaml?
For the love of all things pure, holy, and just, please do not use YAML in your APIs…
Fine, and if you don’t use json in your API because of the deficiency highlighted in the meme, what format do you use in your API?
I use JSON. I have used Avro for things in Kafka but I’m not sure the benefits outweigh the negatives. Avro is much more complicated than people think and most folks don’t really have a strong desire to learn how it should be used and do stuff incorrectly. Everybody knows JSON and it works with everything though. (Example: so many people just hear that Avro schemas can be backwards compatible but have zero idea that you still need the schema that wrote the message even if you want to read it into a newer one.)
Interestingly, I take the meme as saying a dev is using the wrong types in their serialization format (using strings to store integers) which was my biggest problem with Avro. Mostly from people not using logical types or preferring to use ISO 8601 datetime strings instead of the built-in
timestamp-millistype.
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
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.
It’s the API’s job to validate it either way. As it does that job, it may as well parse the string as an integer.
deleted by creator
Or even funnier: It gets parsed in octal, which does yield a valid zip code. Good luck finding that.
Oof.
I guess this is one of the reasons that some linters now scream if you don’t provide base when parsing numbers. But then again good luck finding it if it happens internally. Still, I feel like a ZIP should be treated as a string even if it looks like a number.
Yep. Much like we don’t treat phone numbers like a number. The rule of thumb is that if you don’t do any arithmetic with it, it is not a “number” but numeric.
Well, we don’t, but every electonic tables software out in the wild on the other hand…
/j
Yes, I know that you can force it to become text by prepending
'to the phone, choose an appropriate format for the cells, etc, etcThe point is that this often requires meddling after the phone gets displayed as something like
3e10
I refuse to validate data that comes from the backend I specifically develop against.
A string that represents types…
If a item can have different type, those label fields are actually quite useful. So I don’t see the problem
Explicit types are just laziness, you should be catching exceptions anyways.
I do. I return an error.
Protocol Buffers are hated, but they are needed.
Do you actually use them?
I’m a student so, yes and no?
I do, but I also don’t think that’s a silver bullet, unfortunately. There’s convenience in code generation and compatibility, at least
The comment section proves that xml is far superior to json
