[zinkem]

Not mentioned in the article, but bit packed data structures are easier to interpret in hardware and offer more guarantees. If I'm designing an FPGA/ASIC I can predict how many clock cycles a statically sized data structure will need to move through my system, and how much RAM I need while it's being processed.

I have spent a lot of time working with FPGAs that process network packets and many of the performance guarantees relied on the rigid structure of L2-4 protocol headers.

[alexeiz]

I was a bit surprised myself that the author prefers JSON to bit-packed protocols, but given that the author is none other than Eric Raymond, I have to take him seriously.

Accidentally, in my work lately I used JSON for data exchange over the network where performance is not important, and MsgPack otherwise where it is (which is essentially a packed JSON).

[akerl_]

I feel like the fact that it's ESR causes me to take him less seriously. I'm basing that on the other contents of his blog, such as http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7239 , http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26 , and http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6907 .

[tptacek]

We don't even need to get into his (execrable) politics; he's substantively bad on technical issues as well.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6839

[bch]

> “Are you” she asked “the most famous programmer in the world?”

> This was a question which I had, believe it or not, never thought about before. But it’s a reasonable one to ask...

That is precious.

[jcranmer]

Don't worry, if you look into the comments, the politics really comes out in force.

[tptacek]

Did he manage to work white nationalism into binary versus ascii wire formats? I've seen him make some pretty impressive leaps before but that would be outdoing himself.

[DonHopkins]

Appeal to authority, huh? Do you also take all of his many racist statements seriously, "just because he's none other than Eric Raymond"?

"The average IQ of the Haitian population is 67... Haiti is, quite literally, a country full of violent idiots." -Eric S Raymond

"... The minimum level of training required to make someone effective as a self defense shooter is not very high... unfortunately, this doesn't cover the BLM crowd, which would have an average IQ of 85 if it's statistically representative of American blacks as a whole. I've never tried to train anyone that dim and wouldn't want to." -Eric S Raymond

https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848

(Note: this is just the tip of the shitberg. There are SO MANY MORE examples on so many other topics (like "Is the casting couch fair trade?") from so many other times over the decades.)

[wmf]

There's no need to appeal to authority; the article gives specific reasons when to use JSON and when to use binary. What do you think about those arguments?

[hedora]

There’s a nice rebuttal from one of the ntp people in the article’s comments.

JSON is a disaster for many reasons. Hardware incompatible floating point is one; inconsistency in parser implementations (and ambiguities in the spec) also don’t help.

Also, why use a tree structured data representation when the underlying data structure is fundamentally just a N-tuple with a fixed schema?

Similarly, why use a text protocol to send around fixed length blobs or encrypted data?

[dfranke]

Just to clarify the phrase "one of the NTP people": I'm the lead designer of NTS, which adds modern cryptographic security to NTP. I did not design NTP; Dave Mills did that, in large part before I was born.

If I got the chance to redesign NTP from scratch, there are a lot things I'd change, but use of fixed binary fields is not one of them.

[syrrim]

Even the greats make mistakes:

https://media.8ch.net/file_store/685c60d14c5b269cb9571c1f630...

[keithnz]

I use CBOR, which is a really nice binary Json. I use it for a custom protocol for embedded systems and it's just brilliant.

[cjbprime]

Yep, see also MessagePack. Kind of telling that esr didn't notice the existence of either.