this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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How is it that you worked with JSON very often and don't know that it stands for JavaScript Object Notation or what stringify does?
I use it as a format for, e.g., config files or for serializing data in a human readable format. Mainly from C++, sometimes from Python or C#.
Never in these years did I stumble over stringify.
Cause json has become ubiquitous in a lot of other contexts. Heck on a ton of Cisco NXOS implementations you can even pipe output to json in the cli. It's also used in a shitload of application configurations now instead of a flat .conf file too. In fact when I really think about it, I haven't touched JS in a long freaking time (like years), but have probably touch json at least once a week. I just don't find it that far fetched that someone would be working with json daily and be incredibly divorced from it's original implementation.
But they keep implying they are software engineers using JSON in a development capacity... I'd understand a system admin updating a config file to only be familiar with the syntax, but if you're consuming JSON in your code you either understand the spec enough to implement it, or you didn't write that code...
Something rubbed me wrong about not knowing what JSON is and insulting web developers as not real software engineers in the same breath.
They didn’t say they don’t know what it stands for.
They don’t work with JavaScript. I don’t deal with JS very often at all. I do know stringify, since I did a bunch of JS stuff back in the 2010s. But it’s not unreasonable for a dev to not know JS.