[exceptione]

Interesting, I had to look up what EDN is. Important to note that EDN doesn't have a concept of a schema like JSON Schema.

This is a `map`, which bears semblence with a Json object. The following might look like an incorrect paylood, but will actually parse as valid EDN:

  {:a 1, "foo" :bar, [1 2 3] four}
  // Note that keys and values can be elements of any type. 
  // The use of commas above is optional, as they are parsed as whitespace.

If one wants to exchange complex data structures, Aterm is also an option: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~daybuild/daily-books/technology/at...

Some projects in Haskell use Aterms, as it is suitable for exchanging Sum and Product types.

[delaguardo]

One of a key design principles in EDN is to be exclusively data exchange format. Which is true even for JSON where json-schema is something that sits on top of JSON itself. Same goes to EDN - in Clojure there is clojure.spec that adds schema like notation, validation rules and conformation. https://clojure.org/about/spec , something like this could be implemented in other languages as well.

[ndr]

One clever difference is that you can use namespaced keywords for instance no more doubt of what :username might mean, you could use :com.ycombinator.news/username as key.

If you worked in exclusively static typed languages it takes a while to grasp how convenient this is when you're mixing data from different sources.

[fulafel]

JSON doesn't have schemas either, JSON Schema is just a separate schema spec that happens to build on JSON, but you might be using for example Zod instead of that. Similarly systems that consume EDN can have various schema systems. For example spec or malli in the Clojure world. (Or you could be using Zod with EDN, etc).