[biztos]

I think the reason JSON caught on outside the Javascript community is because it caught on so massively inside the Javascript community, at a time when there was a lot more crossover between people working on the javascript layer of web apps and people working on the server side (back then, almost always in a different language).

I was doing mostly Perl and Javascript when it caught on, and to this day I have very mixed feelings: it's wasteful of space but still doesn't allow comments; its type system is basically a technical-debt generator; and for all that people still get it wrong pretty often. On the other hand, it's more or less human readable for simple data structures and it's more or less everywhere.

My hunch is that for a new format to take off it wouldn't so much need to not fall between YAML and JSON: it would need to be the default format of something with such super exponential growth that even us oldies would have to use it.