[garybernhardt]

JSON syntax is Python/Ruby primitive syntax for lists and strings (although the reverse isn't quite true). Why add a library import and additional code on each side just to emit and consume what is effectively the same data? :)

[ssadler]

Because it's a standard and not a hack, because you wont have to do workarounds like utf8 encoding unicode objects, and because it's also easy.

[garybernhardt]

This is my personal list of RSS feeds, which I've been curating for many years, so I knew exactly what data was coming. It was a one-time hack: it got my RSS feed list into the database, and was never excuted again. It was also only for local testing purposes.

I think that it would be pretty crazy to import simplejson on the Python side, write extra code to dump the data to JSON, look up how to do it in Ruby (because I don't know off the top of my head), and add the code to load it from JSON. That effort would not change the outcome by a single bit. For other theoretical data sets, it would, but this is not other data sets.

If this code were ever going to be used again, sure, I'd transfer it in a safe way. But this is the equivalent of `grep`ing and `cut`ing at the Unix shell – the goal is to get data from point A to point B, never to be revisited. I reject the idea that, in this particular case, extra effort to serialize and deserialize JSON data is superior to adding five characters of str().