[throwawaysed]

instead of messing with JSON and making it less human friendly (arguably the thing that made JSON so popular in the first place), why not just use something designed for efficient machine-to-machine transfer?

Basically making JSON more machine friendly and stricter to parse undermines the original reason to use JSON. If efficiency and absolute correctness are important use something not designed to be forgiving to humans :)

[derefr]

Postel's law: things should parse JSON, but probably only emit SON. That gets you the best of both worlds: you can assume all messages internal to your system are in a canonicalized form (and thus do thing like hashing them with dumb tools), but your system still interoperates with other systems that don't bother to canonicalize, parsing their inputs and sending responses they understand.

[snakeanus]

>making it less human friendly (arguably the thing that made JSON so popular in the first place)

I would not call a JSON human friendly due to its lack for comments.

[seagreen]

You might be interested in JSON5 (http://json5.org/) which goes the opposite direction of Son and makes JSON more human-writeable. It's the best, cleanest "JSON+" I've found so far.