As a programmer who had to wrestle with like 30 formats during his career, here'... | Hacker News

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		pdimitar on Oct 4, 2020 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Show HN: Concise Encoding – a friendly data format... As a programmer who had to wrestle with like 30 formats during his career, here's one piece of non-negotiable requirement: ---------- NO. OPTIONAL. PARTS. OF. THE. STANDARD! (And no "but"-s.) ---------- Start there. This might sound flippant and snarky but I promise you that it isn't. Don't ever leave anything to the implementations. Oh, and build your own compliance tool. So people can just run the results of their own implementations against your tool and see if their code is compliant with your data format or not.

tux3 on Oct 4, 2020 [–]

Votes on comments are not public, so let me agree loudly: Many people will not want to use a format with implementation defined or optional behavior.

That way lies pain.

kstenerud on Oct 4, 2020 | [–]

Right. No optional stuff then!

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