A little JSON in the morning

I’m continually finding it amazing that much of that which I’ve taught myself over the years actually has a common method in use as a standard part of coding.

The code that I concocted myself for my PHP scripts that handled data from MySQL/Maria pretty much utilised the flexibility of arrays to organise the data, retrieve it, and display it.

The Swift language does much of the same things, except that it has special names for different types of arrays. Putting data in multi-dimensional arrays, which is what I’ve done since I first sat down at a ZX81 in the early 80s, is covered today in the simplified “JSON” format.

JSON apparently stands for “JavaScript Object Notion”, when it’s really just a form of multi-dimensional array that we were using long before JavaScript and Objects were even glints in a language developer’s eye.

Today I learned … that I feel so old..!