Because there are a thousand ways to describe the same thing in JSON. This:

    city = {
        "id": 3,
        "name": "Foo",
        "lat": 3.555,
        "long": 4.11,
    }

Is the same as:

    city = {
        "id": "3",
        "name": "Foo",
        "coordinates": [3.555, 4.11]
    }

But you want to normalize that.

Something like Cuelang will:

- Define the schema that will let you know what you should put inside.

- Allow you to inflate that schema into a full file, providing only the values.

- Will generate always a correct file, with no typo, or format error.

- Will check that the data is correct and tell you if there are any errors.

- Is note theoretically tied to a particular run time or stack.

Sounds like a job for JSON Schema

https://json-schema.org

Jumping back and forth between a JSON schema and writing valid JSON is not a very fun task

In your example, how is this different than incorrectly creating the data structure in any format ?

I'll be looking into cue, but how does it solve that problem ?

One thing that is not generally considered is that while it's quick to switch language, it's not true for ecosystems.

Yes, you can be productive in python syntax quickly, but I've seen enought people failing at building a sane python project I know that other things take more time: libs, tooling, workflow, typical error, debugging, deployment strats, etc.

So you do want at least one specialist in the team to drive the generalists.

That explains my view that it takes months to learn a language whilst others say it takes days.

You can't be proficient in a language until you can write programs in to and that includes being able to build and use common libraries, debug in it and use common tools well.

I get what you’re saying. But, it depends.

Someone who has been learning for 20 or 30 years probably can pick up a new ecosystem easier. “I can learn it in a day because I’ve been learning for 30 years”, etc.

But it is still not a day.

I have done this for 30-40 years. Yes I can guess better than a junior but still takes time.

My public administration clients do exactly that with my profile: they want to hire me but must pretend they consider competition, so they publish my resume as a requirement.

Actually DuckDB has its own database format for persistence and can support writes. It’s not obvious from their documentation. People told me that on HN not long ago, as I thought the same than you.

It can also write Parquet files and other formats.

Oh, thanks, TIL.

DuckDB isn't optimized for writing speed, but it is not read-only.

I’m looking at some DuckDB code right here that does `INSERT INTO … ON CONFLICT (id) DO UPDATE SET` so it can definitely do upserts :)

Ok, I retract.

There is not a single animal that wants to be eaten, what are you talking about?

We just draw a line saying: this is ok, this is not, arbitrarily. Nobody, nothing, wants to suffer. That's one of the rare things life universally agrees on.

There is no need for words to express that.

And I think it's ok to do so, but if we can eat whales, octopus, and take cows and chickens and make their existence hell until we consume them, labeling a spider as "evil" because it likes eating humans is far fetched.

I mean, my moral framework may be simple, but it's consistent, and more importantly, it makes it morally impermissible to kill and eat me.

If the giant spiders were unintelligent, they'd not be moral actors, and then eating people might be a bad thing, but it wouldn't be a morally bad (evil) thing.

If their prey weren't intelligent, my moral framework doesn't (currently) include an absolute prohibition on killing and eating animals, so that would be morally acceptable.

But because both the spider and their prey were intelligent, my rules kick in and it is immoral for the spiders to eat people, or vice versa.

(Now, there may be a loophole in that killing people for the purposes of eating them is always unacceptable, but there are circumstances where it is at least forgivable to kill [eg, self defense], and also circumstances where it is likewise acceptable to eat already dead intelligent creatures, but you have to be careful not to create a moral hazard where the killing is done on a pretext.)

We eat and kill non aggressive animals all the time. We are predator, and history has shown how little compassion we can demonstrate.

You and I are also very much the descendant of mass murderers that waged wars, raped and tortured.

I don't consider myself evil, but because of this, I just think the spider is acting like a spider.

I don't see that being evil either.

The fact that it's what makes it not evil is a huge philosophical debate.

Also we did enslaved our own, raped them, and killed them, pretending they were not intelligent and didn't have a soul.

We do eat octopus, which have demonstrated level of intelligence close to a human child.

Also, suffering is not proportional to intelligence, are you evil because you make life suffers, or because it understands how you do it ?

I don't think it's that clear cut. And I'm not sure we would stop to eat beef if tomorrow somebody proved they are quite smart.

The orgies of meat we bath into based on factories that turn chickens and cows existences into support to grow protein and nothing else does remind me of the spider.

By that description, that makes pretty much all humans in our civilization evil.

We do exactly that.

Indeed, it could be a number of reasons:

- Making code more accessible mean people with lower skills can contribute.

- Increased in productivity increased expectations for deadlines and so there is less time for quality.

- 2023 was a year with lower code quality on average for everybody.

- Easier code to produce meant more code produced, and maybe it dwarfed the absolute amount of quality code, giving this impression, while the relative amount didn't change but we don't have their way of measuring good code.

Etc

I wish we'd steal more. TS type systel and syntax is much better that what we have.

And I hope one day iter[] and callable[] will be made available, cause importing typing sucks.