JSON was discovered and not invented

By the time the JSON schema was being written, many people already have been using the {} [] and whatnot in JavaScript and other languages, but it was Douglas Crockford who proposed to use the same notation from JavaScript to describe data in a document format for data exchanging and went on to actually write the schema and its specs.

In a talk I stumbled upon, which is highly recommended and its link is below, Douglas starts with "JSON was not invented, it was discovered" where I think he meant here two things:

• that it partially existed before and he just added some stuff and nothing more. Or: (which I like more)
• it's so intuitive, that I'm sure it was used in the stone age, to the point where you can model anything with it. I, for one, usually find myself scratching on my note book {, } and their friends when I want to describe a thing... just quote everything and get done with it 😆

Another nice idea in the talk was that Douglas didn't just "shut up" when people yield at him and said: "but we already have XML as a standard" when he mentioned JSON. Maybe it's really beneficial to pursue other solutions to problems we already have solutions for.

But oh my God, I never thought that someday we will be using YAML to generate JSON for configuration files (a recommended read -> The YAML document from Hell), I mean come on.

Anyway, in the talk, a lot of lovely questions that you usually don't have the time to look for an answer for are casually answered, like why no comments in JSON, why no versions hell and a lot more, happy watching: