[hyperpallium]

hmm, JSON is only a decade and a half old, so not "decades" for that particular one. And it's only really taken off within the last few years.

You're right about it being conceptually solved for many decades, but we here developers like to reinvent everything every decade or so.

For example, back when XML was gaining in popularity, around 2000, there were new parsers/serializing libraries launched all over the place - even standards like SAX and DOM. Many people rolled their own; many had to.

[groby_b]

It's not like JSON is the first serialization format ever. (I still have XDR & CDR nightmares, and that was the early 90's)

So, yes, decades. Not necessarily solved well, but yes, people shipped data over the network before JS ;)