[dietrichepp]

That's a good description, but I'd say that we have a strongly <-> weakly typed axis and a statically <-> dynamically typed axis here. Or I might actually prefer to name the first axis poorly <-> richly typed.

            poorly typed <-------------> richly typed
    dynamic CSV, INI          JSON          YAML, Ion
    static        Bencode, ASN.1      Protobuf

What I mean by "richly typed" is that you would never read a timestamp off the wire and not know that it's a timestamp. By comparison, with CSV or INI files, you just have strings everywhere. Formats on the richly typed side have separate and explicit types for binary blobs and text, for example.

[haberman]

Sure, I think your "poorly typed" vs. "richly typed" axis just refers to how many built-in types it has. It's true that CSV and INI only have one type (string). And it's true that when more types are built in, you have fewer cases where you have to just stuff your data into a specially-formatted string.

[dietrichepp]

Yes, that's exactly what I said.