Programming

17484 readers

128 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

223

Which protocol or open standard do you like or wish was more popular? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/programming

271 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.

The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.

I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

About s-expressions, what i read about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20120206034439/https://shinkirou.org/blog/2010/06/s-expressions-the-fat-free-alternative-to-json/

Seems rather niche, for non-key-value-pair data structures (aren't no-sql databases good for that?), considering that lightweight markup fulfills that role for readable document source.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

The appeal for json and yaml is readability, and partially ease of parsing. I say s-expressions win over both in both aspects.

Can you please expand on your references to no-sql and your reference to "lightweight markup"? I don't quite understand what you meant there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

S-expressions are basically directly writing the AST a compiler would normally generate. They can be extremely flexible. M-expressions were supposed to be programming part of Lisp, and S-expressions the data part. Lisp programmers noticed that code is just another kind of data to be manipulated and then only used S-expressions.

Logo is arguably a Lisp with M-expressions. But whatever niche Logo had is taken by Python now.