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?
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?
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.
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?