We aren't using json.atChar(17) to get values?

I'm not sure if i'm missing a joke here, so:

In case you're making a joke: The people who don't type JSON are using controllers.

In case you're asking a serious question: the people who don't type JSON are the people in OP's image. They are technically using types, but that type is literally always string. They don't use integers, they don't use booleans. This is functional but may not be the best choice, depending on what kinds of data their system is supposed to handle.

The fun differences between the perfect world of theoretical and the realistic. Everyone thinks of computers as perfect - but it's not until you're asked to solve "How do you store decimals using only 0s and 1s?" does it start to click. Not as easy. It's why I'm hesitant to hire bootcampers into my roles. Bootcamps are great, and they get more people coding, but you don't learn that theory behind the scenes - you don't really know what the computer and operating systems are doing. For 90% of the time it doesn't matter, it's abstracted away - but that last 10% man, that can really fuck up an entire system.

Lovecraftian horror for mathematicians. Immediately goes insane.

Until you get to multi currency, which is why I don't support using ints or longs, and strings are still the only way. There are currencies that have no precision, and others that have 3 or more digits of precision - and then you're looking at doing calculations each time. Strings are the safest way to make sure you're representing exactly what you want to when sending data over the wire or persisting

try to stick with integers in a currency’s smallest unit of division

And then the marketing department comes up with products that cost 1.5ct apiece.

Correct, JSON can handle any precision, because it's just dumped as a string anyway, just not enclosed in the "". However, as you mentioned, as soon as it comes through the parser it'll put it into an underlying float value. In C# I create a save high precision attribute that will take the value and put it directly into a decimal. In JS I'm sure there's some way to do that, but that parser is way less extensible compared to C#. However, this also all assumes you know the client will parse it correctly, overriding the default behavior. Safest is to just send it as a string, and then create your parsers to automatically send to and from strings

Ha yeah "Sr dev" was never seen again, the team member stuck around for quite a few more years.

JsonSchema is a way to validate some JSON. A great thing when you want to stop any sort of malformed data from coming in. Instead of wrecking your head in your code testing whether this bit here is not null, or is that string a valid boolean (I still remember that shitty piece of code they had, ugh!) or that bit is empty or that one is an actual number, or a string that can only have such and such value, well, you can formalise all this in one place, as a data file instead of code. Very convenient.

Except when it turns out you're using a JSON library that's not one, not two, but six major versions behind, and the security department won't greenlight you using anything recent because... fuck you, that's why. And to add insult to injury, we were the Quality department. Responsible for analysing the code quality of thousands of coders, around a hundred thousand programs (mostly COBOL but also C#), of a European banking group... The JSON schema was for adding a layer of non existant security to our API. But no, let's keep accepting shitty malformed JSON (because of course we kept receiving shitty JSON; that's why we wanted to implement this)

So I had to rewrite a lot of custom code to patch the bugs we found in the library, and none of the nifty tools that let you put in json and generate json schema would work for us. Heck, they even have JsonSchema to validate your JsonSchema but those wouldn't work either, so far behind our version was.

Fucking awesome experience. I'm glad it's behind me.

Yes. And many people here doesn't seem to get that.

I'm not a dev of any kind. I occasionally write some bash and awk scriots to automate some things and if I need some kind of plain text (non-binary) data format I prefer tsv over json.

So why do I still get this? Is it just that many json advocates want to make sure others know json does support other data types than plain string?