all-hail-the-mighty-json

all-hail-the-mighty-json

If you like JSON so much, why don't you program with it?

JSON has supplanted overly-verbose XML and S-expressions as the de facto data exchange format for modern computing. By simultaneously avoiding explicit and rigid schemas and providing a simple, unambiguous representation, JSON is truly the way of the future.

This project progresses the benevolent dominance of Douglas Crockford's (praise be upon Him) JSON to its next logical step. Programs themselves often rely on data formats that are highly verbose or dependent on arbitrary and sometimes platform-specific characters like newlines or semicolons. all-hail-the-mighty-json is a programming language for the modern developer who understands that JSON is the One True Path.

Instead of representing code as messy and hard-to-skim S-expressions, or as silly lines of code, all-hail-the-mighty-json uses JSON itself to represent source code. The below example shows how to calculate the factorial of five:

["last",
 ["defun", "\"factorial\"", {"args":["n"],
			                 "body": ["cond",
				                      ["<=", "n", 1],
				                      1,
				                      ["*", "n",
									      ["factorial", ["-", "n", 1]]]]
	                        }],
 ["console.log", ["factorial", 5]]
]

Obviously, this approach uses a standard monadic eager-applicative functor over an immutable fixed point combinator of the state space, as is popular in any decent modern frontend web framework. Save this program to sample.json and run it as follows:

~ $ npm install -g all-hail-the-mighty-json
~ $ all-hail-the-mighty-json sample.json 
120
~ $ 

Minified, the entire interpreter is only 550 bytes, making it a small addition to your no-doubt multi-megabyte Angular2/JQuery/Bootstrap stack. Future versions will include support for async/await, JSX, reactive programming, and possibly something actually useful.