New blog post: You could have designed the Json.Decode library!

[jacob]

At elm-conf I had a weird idea about writing a universal JSON decoder that decoded JSON into a generic JsonValue type. I noodled with it for a while and realized that my experimentation didn’t yield any crazy new tech but did help me understand why Json.Decoder works the way it does better than anything I’d seen previously. I just published a blog post that explains what I learned: https://dev.to/matthewsj/you-could-have-designed-the-jsondecode-library-2d8 I’d love to hear what you think about it!

[avh4]

I think this is a great in-depth answer to the question you mention in the beginning (“why is Json.Decode so confusing?”), and also does a great job of showing the logical process to arrive at the API.

The one suggestion I’d have is that the article is quite long–does dev.to have a way to add a table of contents?

Also, I’m curious if there were other APIs for this that you originally tried to implement which you initially thought might be a nicer API but weren’t possible to implement. If so, I’d be interested to see a small section showing why some of those things didn’t work (or maybe in a future blog post).

[SergKam]

Good work!
I’m working on the closed-source SPA than will be open-sourced soon.
In this application, I am working with exactly this JSON-like structure because I need to work with unstructured user defined JSON and JSON-schema (format it, merge, modify, etc).
I implemented collapsable json view, custom pretty print, and implementing json-path (xpath like) function on top of it. So there are some cases where Json.Decode is not the best solution.
In my case, the described structure works very well.

[joakin]

Very nice article in all aspects I learnt and discovered a lot.

I think this is a great resource for people struggling with decoders. For example I never really stopped to think about the definition of the type Decoder, even if I had been using it . Seeing the type alias with the examples has made the pieces of knowledge and usage click together, thanks a lot.

[Qqwy]

I just want to say: You’re a lifesaver! With the help of your blogpost, I’ve finally been able to completely refactor my own decoding library (that decodes hexadecimal Ethereum ABI requests and responses); the decoders are finally composable.

For anyone who hasn’t read this article yet: It’s really worth the time!

[SergKam]

As promised half year ago
My “universal” json parser, edit functions, renderer and collapsible interactive viewer
https://github.com/zalando-incubator/nakadi-ui/blob/master/client/Helpers/JsonEditor.elm

[luke]