[erlang-questions] JSON for STDLIB

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

How quickly they forget.
There is an EEP for JSON in Erlang, but even back then,
there were already several libraries with incompatible
answers to various questions.
Since then JSON has changed a bit (for example, according
to one "official" JSON "standard", having a number or
string at top level is OK), and Erlang has changed more
(we now have maps).

Arguably, standardising on a JSON representation too early
would have *harmed* Erlang by locking us into something
that doesn't fit as well as maps do.

I don't think JSON parsing has to be in stdlib.

I do think it would be nice to have *one* place to
look for Erlang packages, even if it's just a
version-stamped-link farm.  I don't care if there are
20 JSON libraries as long as there is one place to
look for them.

(Oh, and writing a JSON parser in Erlang really is *not*
hard.  The whole *point* of JSON is that it's supposed to
be easy to process.  Which is why there are so many libraries...)