alt Hacker News> When judging which alternative will succeed, lower perceived human cost beats lower machine cost every time.
Yup this is it. No architect considers using protos unless there is an explicit need for it. And the explicit need is most times using gRPC.
Unless the alternative allows for zero cost startup and debugging by just doing `console.log()`, they won't replace JSON any time soon.
Edit: Just for context, I'm not the author. I found the article interesting and wanted to share.
Print debugging is fine and all but I find that it pays massive dividends to learn how to use a debugger and actually inspect the values in scope rather than guessing which are worth printing. It also is useless when you need to debug a currently running system and can't change the code.
And since you need to translate it anyway, there's not much benefit in my mind to using something like msgpack which is more compact and self describing, you just need a decoder to convert to json when you display it.