Douglas Crockford: The JSON Saga

Because using certain keys could break your JavaScript (and JSON was designed to be a subset), like { delete: "me" } If you don't want to keep a list of known keywords around, just insisting on quotes is the easier way. [EDIT: See also this YouTube video, where Douglas Crockford explains it himself: [VIDEO] ]

You may also get a chuckle out of an anecdote about the license that Douglas Crockford gave during one of this talks: [VIDEO]

Here is the quote the post refers to from "The JSON Saga": When I put the reference implementation onto the website, I needed to put a software license on it. I looked up all the licenses that are available, and there were a lot of them. I decided the one I liked the best was the MIT license, which was a notice that you would put on your source, and it would say: "you're allowed to use this for any purpose you want, just leave the notice in the source, and don't sue me." I love that license, it's really good. But this was late in 2002, we'd just started the War On Terror, and we were going after the evil-doers with the President, and the Vice-President, and I felt like I need to do my part. [laughter] So I added one more line to my license, which was: "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." I thought I'd done my job. About once a year I'll get a letter from a crank who says: "I should have a right to use it for evil!" [laughter] "I'm not going to use it until you change your license!" Or they'll write to me and say: "How do I know if it's evil or not? I don't think it's evil, but someone else might think it's evil, so I'm not going to use it." Great, it's working. My license works, I'm stopping the evil doers! Audience member: If you ask for a separate license, can you use it for evil? Douglas: That's an interesting point. Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company--I don't want to embarrass the company by saying

Also, there's an ongoing development effort on "Red" programming language [1a][1b][1c], originally attempted as a +/- open-source clone of REBOL (given that original REBOL had a proprietary license, and after version 2 was stuck in development hell for many years). Since then, REBOL in a kinda "pre-3" version was (after long nagging by the community, and arguably to everybody's surprise), released under Apache license circa 2012 [2]; though IIUC, in a kinda "unfinished" state, although I'm not really sure to what extent. Still, the Red language development goes on, I believe in part because of somewhat different philosophies and goals. Back to the language(s) themselves, the REBOL & Red family is very interesting and I think perspective-widening -- which also means it requires some effort to understand well, it's not your typical "Algol in new clothes". What sounds most interesting to me is that it seems to be kinda "dialect-oriented" -- meaning that to use it idiomatically, you should get used to writing tiny parsers (with provided toolbox) for small ad-hoc DSLs. That sounds very nice and interesting, but I unfortunately have one issue with learning that -- that I can't really find good learning resources for that (neither for REBOL nor for Red). Even the official REBOL docs/"manual" seem to be too much "example-oriented" for me; I heavily miss some good "specification"/exhaustive manual, which would show me what are the limits, how does the full BNF look like, etc. In other

I wonder if they've ever run into the problem Douglas Crockford had with IBM requesting he clarify the "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" clause he added to the MIT license for JSLint.... [VIDEO]

I think you missed the "well" in my quote (no one said it was hypothetical). Naturally the XMLHttpRequest / AJAX was used with XML first. Microsoft were the ones to introduce it to do exactly that; work with their exchange server's XML. This is why I said "well". XML isn't a perfect fit into JavaScript's existing objects. It's awkward. Mozilla, imperfectly, copied the interface Microsoft came up with to have a sort of standard and 4 months after that Crockford started using JSON[1]. I don't see much history of applications beyond Microsoft's and a few edge cases that really used XML here; most of what I can find online had a lot of people's first usage of AJAX with JSON or plain text. But I'll admit it's very difficult to find solid data. But ultimately XMLHttpRequest came out, in its very first ActiveX form in IE, in March 1999 and Crockford started playing with JSON in April 2001. Wikipedia claims XMLHttpRequest didn't become a de facto standard until 2004 when other browsers started adopting it[2] so I'm not convinced it was used for very much XML to begin with. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]

I'm not gonna bother quoting you to fisk you. Your approach towards my evidence is weak overall. I'm gonna throw more evidence at you. Miller and Dean Tribble have been working on WeakRefs lately: [LINK] Crockford's personal site no longer has the original JSON description, and neither does the Wayback Machine, but his site does still have a section on E: [LINK] In this talk [0], Crockford discusses the origin of JSON. He mentions working with Chip Morningstar (this guy [LINK] ) and has oblique references to his prior work. He doesn't bother to explain what he was doing during the 90s here, and at this point social interaction becomes required to learn more. 'hammering the ES peg in the E hole' is wrong. They're hammering the E peg into the ES hole. Not all of us believe in this approach; some of us think that JS is irredeemable and that we should keep iterating with languages like Pony and Monte which expand on the original E concepts. Like I said, kicking and screaming. I don't know why you all kick and scream so much, but you do. [0] [VIDEO]

> I discovered JSON. I do not claim to have invented JSON because it already existed in nature. What I did was I found it, I named it, I described how it was useful. I don’t claim to be the first person to have discovered it. I know that there are other people who discovered it, at least, a year before I did. The earliest occurrence I found was there was someone at Netscape who was using JavaScript array literals for doing data communication as early as 1996, which was at least 5 years before I stumbled onto the idea. [VIDEO]