this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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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…”

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[–] [email protected] 110 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (9 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

throws keyboard in trash

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

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

True, and also true.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] firelizzard 34 points 4 months ago (15 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 49 points 4 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (3 children)

strings are in base two, got it

[–] [email protected] 38 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Wouldn't the answer be "10" in that case?

[–] [email protected] 41 points 4 months ago

yes, if I could do maths

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (6 children)

1 11 111 1111 11111 111111

That's base 1. By convention, because it doesn't really fit the pattern of positional number systems as far as I can tell, but it gets called that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Oh, I get it, was reading as base 2 and confused by that. Essentially Roman numerals without all the fancy shortcuts.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

That's unary.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 44 points 4 months ago (4 children)

These JSON memes got me feeing like some junior dev out there is upset because they haven't read and understood the docs.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

Timing is about right for it to be a batch of newly minted CS grads getting into their first corporate jobs.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Comments? Comments? Who needs comments?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'll have you know all of my code is stringly typed.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago (7 children)
[–] 0x0 10 points 4 months ago (13 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

What, no! Use TOML or something for config files.

[–] 0x0 6 points 4 months ago

TOML

Interesting... me likes it.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Explicit types are just laziness, you should be catching exceptions anyways.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

I do. I return an error.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

A string that represents types...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It's the API's job to validate it either way. As it does that job, it may as well parse the string as an integer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I refuse to validate data that comes from the backend I specifically develop against.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

This is String - you’ve seen it before haven’t you, Gollum?

[–] brian 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

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