JSON, not Jason - Computerphile

Understanding one of the most commonly used methods of transferring data from one machine to another.

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[chrzan]

I think that it is also worth mentioning that JSON is easily read by humans, which is something that isn't mentioned and this fact is a very important aspect of its popularity.

[SergeMatveenko]

JSON is not just ASCII. It accepts the entire UTF-8 encoding and requires it from decoders in its spec.

[Shadow]

"Children tend to be an ordered collection" is probably my favourite sentence. :-)

[MrLissu]

From the title, I thought this video would consist of pronunciation advice

[harisiqbalralph]

"Your children are a list of strings"
Personally, I would prefer them to be pointers.

[iabervon]

He missed three values: true, false, and null. This is mainly notable because he otherwise covered absolutely everything you can represent in JSON. The nice thing about it is that it can represent enough structures to be useful and can't represent anything strange or subtle, which minimizes the chance that you'll have bugs in parsing.

[Curor]

What's the joke about XML? It's a format that can't be read by people or machines.

[NoamSilvy]

JSON is a great topic! 👏👏👏There are so many things to talk about around it:
- jsonb
- links to other JSON objects (instead of nesting everything in place)
- JSON Schema
- JSON API
- JSON and Web Semantic
- JSON-LD

It would be great to beginning a series around this :)

[LeonardChurch]

JSON is one of those things in the programming tool box that made me feel really powerful the first time I picked it up. Up to that point I had been taught to either write all my program data out in a csv file, exporting and parsing "by hand" or use the pre-written SQL queries I'd been given to interact with a database. Having the ability to quickly pull data in and out of my program as whole objects without having to worry about how it was being written or whether all the control breaks were happening in the correct order made me feel untouchable.

[RobertMilesAI]

JSON has exactly two problems:

1. No support for comments
2. A comma after the last item in an array or object is a syntax error

Both of these cause problems when manually editing JSON files, which I know isn't what JSON was designed for, but it would be so easy to fix.
Maybe I should file an RFC

[Qbe_Root]

2:20 “This value can be any other JavaScript thing” except a Function, a Symbol, a RegExp, a Date, undefined, null (except in arrays), Infinity, NaN…

[sidgeek]

5:13 to 5:20: "It is used for transferring data in a way that is pretty much _agnostic_ to the programming language being used."
That was a beautiful and figurative way to use the word "agnostic"!

[python-programming]

This is another great Computerphile video! I've got a video series on JSON if anyone wants to learn about using it via Python.

[alimahdi]

Now we know the true identity of JSON Bourne.

[snozzmcberry]

JSON is delightful to work with. So clean, concise & easily pars..e..able? I love it.

[alov]

I've used json to represent a graph for a decision tree pretty recently, and I gotta say it works very well for that kind of application

[madeso]

Great introduction, but a few errors:

Javascript and json have as much in common as java and javascript. JSON is inspired by javascript. It doesn't use the same parser. A javascript interpreter probably exposes a json api too, and stores the binary representation in the same way, but they are not the same. If your javascript is using the javascript parser to parse json, you are open to attack.

In json, the strings are also not required to be unique, so it is not the same as a associative array. Any standard compatible parser however is allowed to place additional requirements, so most implementations ignore this fact.


Javscript is not lightweight. It is lighter than some other text formats, but heavier than other text formats. It is also a lot heaver than binary formats such IFF/RIFF.

[eschelon]

So Jason Derulo's full name is actually Java Script Object Notation Derulo?

[bytefoundry]

JSON Derulo uses the same notation when composing his songs

[theepicslayersss]

you see a lot of JSON files in games nowadays. i guess it is easier to change the settings of things when they are defined clearly in human readable form and do not need compiling to be used.