Comment by refulgentis
11 hours ago
I don't reach for it often but I've been around the block a bit, CC processors in the iPad point of sale I built circa 2010 used it and it seemed a bit off/unnecessary.
In retrospect, its useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase. Lightweight way to give type annotations across organizational boundaries.
> we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect
I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON? I assume there's code that's parsing XML and returning a JSON object? What would make this not perfect, other than a poor implementation of the translator? Would them using JSON help? If JSON is a less expressive format than JSON, is it possible to 100% translate their XML to JSON?
> useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase
Thanks for the insight! Is this what JSDoc/Swagger is now used for?
> I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON?
I'm not sure actually. I haven't personally seen the code, I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML. Maybe it's just their lack of documentation that sucks, but it's become a running joke whenever we get a new partner that the team integrating it jokes that their API is XML.
> I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML
I hear this too, but often when I ask why people say things like that, it's either because XML is "outdated" or because they don't like it.
It's like programs written in C or C++: very few large projects chose those languages nowadays, often for good reasons, so the projects written in those languages are usually 10 to 20 years old. Age comes with a lot of legacy cruft and obscure behaviour, but that's not the fault of those languages per se. Or for people blasting banks for using COBOL, even though COBOL is a perfectly fine high-performance language for the niches bank mainframes serve.