Comment by throw10920

> is the real footgun

This contains a false snuck premise - that one and only one thing was the footgun. This is categorically not true. An obtuse, poorly-understood, purpose-built text-based DSL is absolutely a footgun and if it was replaced with a JSON and inactive accounts had been indicated by `"active": false` instead of a freaking asterisk then this would absolutely would not have happened.

> For historical reasons, we could’ve ended up JSON as “hash”: “” just the same.

That's dishonest, because it intentionally conceals the fact that that's a vanishingly* unlikely scenario.

People have brains that, factually, are far more likely to see a single context-less character "" and not realize the implications of it than to see `"hash": ""` and think "oh, that's normal".

This is just straight-up psychologically true.

> The /etc/shadow format lets you skip values completely, like “::”

Totally irrelevant.

> so your argument doesn’t hold.

False `::` is both (1) still harder to understand than `"active": false` and (2) even though the syntax existed it wasn't used here because everyone thought they understood the system.

Don't make excuses for this insane text syntax. It is, factually, harder to understand than a decently-written JSON format.