[Cyph0n]

For some reason, the banner (infinitely faster?), name, and introductory FAQ-style responses made me think the whole thing is a joke - similar to Vanilla JS [1].

Anyways, it seems like a cool project, so I'll be sure to follow its development closely.

[1]: http://vanilla-js.com/

[pjscott]

The best jokes in software usually have running code. The best of the best are practical.

[DonHopkins]

Like X-Windows: The world's first fully modular software disaster. [1]

[1] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/danger...

[StavrosK]

Like Flask.

[Cyph0n]

It was a joke aimed at Bottle, right? And now it's probably the second most popular Python web framework. Armin knows his shit.

[StavrosK]

Yeah, it was an April fool's joke satirizing web microframeworks. He does, but I don't know if that was more because Flask is a better framework or because of better marketing. I don't think Bottle is really any worse than Flask.

[draw_down]

I had the exact same reaction. I really had to read for a long time (including code) before deciding it was real. "infinitely faster" confused me too.

[kentonv]

I originally released it on April 1st, 2013, with the announcement post:

So, uh… I have a confession to make.

I may have rewritten Protocol Buffers.

Again.

[Keyframe]

Add that as a tag line.

I may have rewritten Protocol Buffers, but infinitely faster.

[otoburb]

Although this is listed on the introduction page, the author is also the same person that co-founded Sandstorm.io[1].

[1] https://sandstorm.io/about

[draw_down]

Mmhmm.

[jtolmar]

If Cap'n Proto is a joke, JSON beat it to the punchline.

What's an efficient binary representation? C Structs. What's an efficient text representation? Javascript objects. But casting arbitrary data to a struct is a horrible idea. And eval'ing anonymous javascript is a horrible idea. Back to the drawing board.

Then N years later someone has the brilliant idea of just... not parsing these formats that idiotic way. And wrote a code generator because the smart way is tedious.

[edraferi]

I'd love to read the full story there - how JSON got so much momentum behind it. Do you know of a good overview blog post?

[kentonv]

In my view, JSON beat XML because it matched the way we structure data in code: records and lists. XML, meanwhile, wants us to represent data structures as text with tags, which isn't how we represent data internally at all, requiring laborious translation steps.

The fact that it was "built-in" to Javascript, of course, helped, by allowing it to compete on even footing (XML is also built in via XMLHttpRequest).