I'd love to see us go even further! Having file formats at all is less human readable than going 9p style, less human (and script) readable than a directory tree of simple values.
The OS has a builtin way to create heirarchical structured data. I'd love to see the boldness to try using that!
This does mean you'd need to tar/zip up your file tree to send it around. It's less clear that this directory is a thing, is meant to be a file like one entity. But by taking our data out of complex file formats and turning it into a a filesystem heirarchy, it removes the arbitrariness of choosing any encoding at all, and it directly opens up all data to scripting. You can echo a new hex color into a foreground file to change it. You can watch a user directory for changes to update a rendering of it. You can btrfs snapshot your window layout to save your desktop configuration.
We have so so many specific tools for computing. It's time that we try making some more general systems, that let us work broadly / regardless of specific application! "Just files" could be a key enabler!
The OS has a builtin way to create heirarchical structured data. I'd love to see the boldness to try using that!
There was a good example of a json->directory tool submitted yesterday, json2dir. https://github.com/alurm/json2dir https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840307
This does mean you'd need to tar/zip up your file tree to send it around. It's less clear that this directory is a thing, is meant to be a file like one entity. But by taking our data out of complex file formats and turning it into a a filesystem heirarchy, it removes the arbitrariness of choosing any encoding at all, and it directly opens up all data to scripting. You can echo a new hex color into a foreground file to change it. You can watch a user directory for changes to update a rendering of it. You can btrfs snapshot your window layout to save your desktop configuration.
We have so so many specific tools for computing. It's time that we try making some more general systems, that let us work broadly / regardless of specific application! "Just files" could be a key enabler!