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…”

  • RustyNova@lemmy.world
    1071·
    6 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
      36·
      6 months ago

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

      throws keyboard in trash

      • Username@feddit.de
        16·
        6 months ago

        Rust has perfectly fine tools to deal with such issues, namely enums. Of course that cascades through every bit of related code and is a major pain.

        • RustyNova@lemmy.world
          24·
          6 months ago

          Sadly it doesn’t fix the bad documentation problem. I often don’t care that a field is special and either give a string or number. This is fine.

          What is not fine, and which should sentence you to eternal punishment, is to not clearly document it.

          Don’t you love when you publish a crate, have tested it on thousands of returned objects, only for the first issue be “field is sometimes null/other type?”. You really start questioning everything about the API, and sometimes you’d rather parse it as serde::Value and call it a day.

    • Rednax@lemmy.world
      122·
      6 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.devEnglish
        32·
        6 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.

    • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
      4·
      6 months ago

      You HAVE to. I am a Rust dev too and I’m telling you, if you don’t convert numbers to strings in json, browsers are going to overflow them and you will have incomprehensible bugs. Json can only be trusted when serde is used on both ends

      • RustyNova@lemmy.world
        2·
        6 months ago

        This is understandable in that use case. But it’s not everyday that you deal with values in the range of overflows. So I mostly assumed this is fine in that use case.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      51·
      6 months ago

      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)

      • RustyNova@lemmy.world
        2·
        6 months ago

        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

  • andyburke@fedia.io
    452·
    6 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.

    • 0x0@programming.dev
      111·
      6 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
          2·
          6 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
          2·
          6 months ago

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

        • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          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!

      • frezik@midwest.social
        1·
        6 months ago

        What I’d like for a configuration language is a parser that can handle in-place editing while maintaining whitespace, comments, etc. That way, automatic updates don’t clobber stuff the user put there, or (alternatively) have sections of ### AUTOMATIC GENERATION DO NOT CHANGE###.

        You need a parser that handles changes on its own while maintaining an internal representation. Something like XML DOM (though not necessarily that exact API). There’s a handful out there, but they’re not widespread, and not on every language.

          • frezik@midwest.social
            2·
            6 months ago

            Is a very good idea providing much needed fixes to the JSON spec, but isn’t really what I’m getting at. Handling automatic updates in place is a software issue, and could be done on the older spec.

            • bitfucker@programming.dev
              2·
              6 months ago

              Hmm, maybe I am missing the point. What exactly do you mean by handling automatic updates in place? Like, the program that requires and parses the config file is watching for changes to the config file?

              • frezik@midwest.social
                2·
                6 months ago

                As an example, Klipper (for running 3d printers) can update its configuration file directly when doing certain automatic calibration processes. The z-offset for between a BLtouch bed sensor and the head, for example. If you were to save it, you might end up with something like this:

                [bltouch]
z_offset: 3.020
...
#*# <---------------------- SAVE_CONFIG ---------------------->
#*# DO NOT EDIT THIS BLOCK OR BELOW. The contents are auto-generated.
#*#
[bltouch]
z_offset: 2.950

                Thus overriding the value that had been set before, but now you have two entries for the same thing. (IIRC, Klipper does comment out the original value, as well.)

                What I’d want is an interface where you can modify in place without these silly save blocks. For example:

                let conf = get_config()
conf.set( 'bltouch.z_offset', 2.950 )
conf.add_comment_after( 'bltouch.z_offset', 'Automatically generated' )
conf.save_config()

                Since we’re declaratively telling the library what to modify, it can maintain the AST of the original with whitespace and comments. Only the new value changes when it’s written out again, with a comment for that specific line.

                Binary config formats, like the Windows Registry, almost have to use an interface like this. It’s their one advantage over text file configs, but it doesn’t have to be. We’re just too lazy to bother.

                • bitfucker@programming.dev
                  2·
                  6 months ago

                  Ahh, then the modification must be done on the AST level not the in-memory representation since anyway you do it, you must retain the original.

    • themusicman@lemmy.world
      41·
      6 months ago

      If you’re moving away from text formats, might as well use a proper serialisation tool like protobuf…

    • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      3·
      6 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.

        • wtfrank@feddit.ukEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          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?

          • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            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-millis type.

    • RustyNova@lemmy.world
      8·
      6 months ago

      If a item can have different type, those label fields are actually quite useful. So I don’t see the problem

      • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
        16·
        6 months ago

        Or even funnier: It gets parsed in octal, which does yield a valid zip code. Good luck finding that.

          • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
            5·
            6 months ago

            I’m not sure if you’re getting it, so I’ll explain just in case.

            In computer science a few conventions have emerged on how numbers should be interpreted, depending on how they start:

            • decimal (the usual system with digits from 0 to 9): no prefix
            • binary (digits 0 and 1): prefix 0b, so 0b1001110
            • octal (digits 0 through 7): prefix 0, so 0116
            • hexadecimal (digits 0 through 9 and then A through E): prefix 0x, so 0x8E

            If your zip code starts with 9, it won’t be interpreted as octal. You’re fine.

            • xthexder@l.sw0.com
              7·
              6 months ago

              Well, you’re right. I wasn’t getting it, but I’ve also never seen any piece of software that would treat a single leading zero as octal. That’s just a recipe for disaster, and it should use 0o116 to be unambiguous

              (I am a software engineer, but was assuming you meant it was hardcoded to parse as octal, not some weird auto-detect)

                • xthexder@l.sw0.com
                  6·
                  6 months ago

                  Interesting that strtol in C does that. I’ve always explicitly passed in base 10 or 16, but I didn’t know it would auto-detect if you passed 0. TIL.

              • Doc Avid Mornington@midwest.socialEnglish
                2·
                6 months ago

                It’s been a long time, but I’m pretty sure C treats a leading zero as octal in source code. PHP and Node definitely do. Yes, it’s a bad convention. It’s much worse if that’s being done by a runtime function that parses user input, though. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that somewhere in the past, but no idea where. Doesn’t seem likely to be common.

        • kamen@lemmy.world
          3·
          6 months ago

          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.

          • bitfucker@programming.dev
            4·
            6 months ago

            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.

            • lad@programming.devEnglish
              1·
              6 months ago

              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, etc

              The point is that this often requires meddling after the phone gets displayed as something like 3e10

  • brian@programming.dev
    62·
    6 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.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      6 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