Comment by fulafel

I guess there are two questions: should the serialization format be coupled with the schema system, and should the serialization format have types.

If you answer the first question with no, then the second question is revealed to just be about various considerations other than validation, such as legibility and obvious mapping to language types (such as having a common notation for symbols/keywords, sets, etc).

JSON and EDN are similar here, if your comment was in context of JSON vs EDN difference. There's some incidental additional checking on the syntax level with EDN but that's not its purpouse.

You can do interesting things with the data even if you don't parse/validate all of it.

Eg an important feature of the spec schema system and philosophy is that you don't want closed specs, you want code to be able to handle and pass on data that is richer than what the code knows about, and if circumstances allow you shouldn't try to validate it in one place.