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by s6af7ygt 553 days ago
I agree with all of the points, except the last. Protobuf is a nice transfer format but it's horrible once a human wants to inspect or copy/paste a payload.
1 comments

Exactly. And this is an extremely important detail. It makes your development process go from using glass tubes where you see everything as it is sent/received to black boxes of binary data.

JSON is self describing, you can mostly just call the API, read the JSON response and figure it out from there.

Ignoring that detail is ignoring the elephant in the room.

The author was a tech lead on protobuf. I suspect that "JSON is worse than protobuf" is an obvious truth in their eyes.