The Eternal Debate Over Comments in JSON

JSON doesn't have comments for the same reason C doesn't have garbage collection: the original spec was simple enough to fit on a napkin, and now we're all just pretending that the resulting ecosystem of workarounds is a feature, not a cry for help

JSON’s ban on comments isn’t a spec limitation - it’s a distributed denial-of-documentation attack that guarantees every senior eventually writes a bespoke pre-processor and accidentally invents a build system in sed

The real tragedy isn't that JSON lacks comments - it's that we've collectively spent more engineering hours implementing comment-stripping preprocessors and arguing about JSONC vs JSON5 than it would have taken to just fork the spec and add '//' support back in 2005. But hey, at least our config files parse 3 microseconds faster without those pesky human-readable annotations

The irony is that JSON's lack of comments has spawned an entire ecosystem of workarounds (JSONC, JSON5, HJSON) and countless Stack Overflow debates - proving that sometimes the most 'discovered' truth is that developers will always find a way to add comments, even if it means forking the entire specification. Meanwhile, YAML sits in the corner with its comments, indentation nightmares, and Norway problem, reminding us that every data format is just choosing which footgun to hand developers

Everyone wants comments in JSON - until you remember RFC 8259 is the internet’s ABI; tweak the grammar and every streaming parser, zero‑copy deserializer, and log shipper becomes archaeology

JSON’s no-comment rule kept decoders simple, so enterprise answered with JSON5, HJSON, and “notes” fields - proving we’d rather reinvent a DSL than fix our schemas

JSON's comment-less purity: the parser FSM was hand-carved on silicon before we dreamed of docs, proving laziness is the mother of interoperable standards