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Douglas Crockford: The JSON Saga

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16K subscribers • 7 videos on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2016 to 2019.
  • Presented by Douglas Crockford, creator of JSON
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 15 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

81K views15 years ago2 recommendations

History and cultureWeb developmentHistory of computingJavaScriptPeople who shaped computing

Douglas Crockford shares the history of how JSON was discovered, standardized, and adopted as a dominant data interchange format.

Yahoo! JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford tells the story of how JSON was discovered and how it became a major standard for describing data.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

Moments people linked to

xrstfon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Fixing JSON”

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: link to this video ]
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Figson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Do we need to rethink what free software is?”

You may also get a chuckle out of an anecdote about the license that Douglas Crockford gave during one of this talks: link to this video
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andrewguentheron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software”

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.…
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akavelon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The REBOL Scripting Language (2000)”

Also, there's an ongoing development effort on "Red" programming language 1a1b1c, 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 fami…
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tlrobinsonon Hacker News • Mentions

On “SQLite: The art of keeping it simple”

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.... link to this video
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BinaryIdioton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Me and SVG”

…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 it2 so I'm not convinced it was used for very much XML to begin with. 1 link to this video 2 link…
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EtDybNuvCuon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Examples of everything new in ECMAScript 2016, 2017, and 2018”

…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 link to this video…
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frou_dhon Hacker News • Mentions

On “YAML: probably not so great after all (2017)”

> 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. link to this video
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vertereon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The rise and rise of JSON (2017)”

> By being at the intersection, JSON turns out to be the thing that everybody can agree on, and so it's really easy to pass data back and forth. Prior data interchange formats tended to try to be the union of all the languages, and that turns out to be horrendously complex and really difficult to deal with. JSON by being so simple actually became really easy to use. - Douglas Crockford ('discoverer' of JSON) link to this video
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antton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Open source confronts its midlife crisis”

>Copyright is just that, copyright. It's not readright, useright, flyright or workforright. It is that. There is a reason why IBM got an exception from the JSON license to do evil: link to this video
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dharmabon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ex-Google workers sue company, saying it betrayed 'Don't Be Evil' motto”

Relation: The JSLint license has a clause stating that it shall not be used for evil. IBM has obtained a license to be able to use JSLint for evil, presumably to avoid this type of suit: link to this video
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Andrew_nenakhovon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Can you stop your open-source project from being used for evil?”

You can use whatever no-evil license for your open-source project, but if you want your project to be FOSS 1, you can't. If you restrict your project from being used for evil, it'll violate the basic freedoms that proper Free licenses grant to their users. Also, check this video by Douglas Crockford 2. ("I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.") 1: link 2: link to this video
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draegtunon Hacker News • Mentions

On “What are the enduring innovations of Lisp? (2022)”

Here's a video where Crockford mentions Rebol (and others) being an influence on JSON - link to this video I've seen it mentioned on Rebol chatter that Crockford approached Carl Sassenrath (creator of Rebol) to open-source & use Rebol prior to creating JSON. NB. Rebol was closed sourced until 2012.
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pcthrowawayon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Mobygratis – Free Moby music to empower your creative projects”

> Personally I don’t like the idea of releasing content with a “use it if I like you “ clause. He’s free to keep it for his own personal use. And he's free to release it under whatever license he wants also. I don't like it as much as a free license either, but it's not my music, and IMO it's better than not granting use; there are of course many cases where people will feel comfortable using it (and in fact it has been used by many people already who have applied common sense to their usage of his work, and I don't believe he has sued anyone or revoked the license in the 18 years he's made it available under similar terms). I also release my code MIT or GPL even though I find it tempting to…
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u/tweqin r/dotnet • Mentions

On “RFC about "open source'ish" software license based upon UN's Human Rights declaration wanted ...”

Similar to Douglas Crockford's "Good not Evil" clause, any such license is effectively unusable by anyone who takes licenses seriously. Even without subjective ethical requirements, anyone with a lawyer will be extremely reluctant to use a non-standard license. I think you'd be better off with a license that prohibits *any* use by governments (exceptions for environmental protection and civil rights?), and any commercial use (above some threshold of gross revenue?). That would leave at least *someone* who can legally use the software. You'll need a team of lawyers to figure out how to word this to ban contractors and shell corporations without excluding anyone who's ever sold a coffee to…
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