JSON and the stringification oddities in JavaScript
JSON is one of the things that looked deceptively simple when I first started learning web development because a JSON string looks just like a textual, minimal subset of a JavaScript object. When I was early in my career, I never took the time to properly study this data format. I just used JSON.stringify and JSON.parse until unexpected errors popped up.
JSON is a data format invented by Douglas Crockford. You probably already know about this, but what’s interesting is that, as Crockford wrote in his own book How JavaScript Works, he admitted that, “The worse thing about JSON is the name.” JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, and the problem with this name is that it misleads people to think it only works with JavaScript when in fact it was intended to allow programs written in different languages to communicate effectively.
On a similar note, Crockford also confessed that the two built-in APIs JavaScript provides to work with JSON – JSON.parse and JSON.stringify – were poorly named as well; they should have been called JSON.decode and JSON.encode respectively, because JSON.parse takes a JSON text and decodes it into JavaScript values and JSON.stringify takes a JavaScript value and encodes it into a JSON text/string.
