[Buttons840]

I get frustrated trying to improve things both big and small. As a small example, our endpoints return a list of JSON objects, as well as the length of that list, as though we're passing C pointers or something. I was under the impression that Javascript could determine the length of a list without help, but apparently that's the way it's done and it's not really worth a confrontation with the client to change such a small thing. Bigger changes are, of course, even more difficult.

Even in the best circumstances there is a slight adversarial relationship with the clients, I think that is the source of a lot of problems.

[winrid]

Returning the length can be helpful for partial JSON parsing - determining the response size without parsing the whole thing.

More commonly it's used for pagination, in which case it's a total count.