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Automatically generating a JSON parser from types is such a killer feature I don’t even think that much about until I have to interact with a third-party HTTP API and suddenly have to write reams and reams of code to very carefully ensure the data is the right shape.

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Graham Christensen

@grhmc

Oct 10, 2019

The GitHub API docs are the king of this. “Here’s a big example json blob!” ... “Whoops, a bunch of these are nullable!”

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Oct 10, 2019

Argh, example based API docs are really frustrating! Examples can be great for explaining stuff, but please give me the actual schema that you’re following! 😬

Replying to

and

(I think the answer is that there was never actually a schema ☹️)

11:00 AM · Oct 10, 2019Twitter for iPhone

Replying to

and

I think a lot of the time this kind of thing happens because the language in question does not have a syntax for writing types down. Which is an interesting point: even ignoring the benefits of static typechecking, statically-typed languages come with a schema notation built-in!

Alexis King

@lexi_lambda

Oct 10, 2019

You absolutely *can* have schema languages for dynamically-typed languages—Racket has its contract system, Clojure has core.spec, etc.—but a lot of languages don’t. And the types are still there, but now you don’t have any agreed-upon notation for talking about them!