this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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I have worked with JSON very often and do not know, what 'Stringify' is. Reading it for the first time. Does it... convert anything to strings?
Looked it up:
https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_json_stringify.asp
Okay JavaScript. Never worked with JS before.
Also, didn't knew web devs are considered 'software engineers' now. /j
How is it that you worked with JSON very often and don't know that it stands for JavaScript Object Notation or what stringify does?
I use it as a format for, e.g., config files or for serializing data in a human readable format. Mainly from C++, sometimes from Python or C#.
Never in these years did I stumble over stringify.
Cause json has become ubiquitous in a lot of other contexts. Heck on a ton of Cisco NXOS implementations you can even pipe output to json in the cli. It's also used in a shitload of application configurations now instead of a flat .conf file too. In fact when I really think about it, I haven't touched JS in a long freaking time (like years), but have probably touch json at least once a week. I just don't find it that far fetched that someone would be working with json daily and be incredibly divorced from it's original implementation.
They didn’t say they don’t know what it stands for.
They don’t work with JavaScript. I don’t deal with JS very often at all. I do know stringify, since I did a bunch of JS stuff back in the 2010s. But it’s not unreasonable for a dev to not know JS.
Good thing you're not in front of a Soviet patrol then like the picture above.
it's funny seeing a gatekeeper talking about web devs not being a software engineer while also not knowing basic JavaScript
📽️
They said software engineer, not bootcamp coder /s
As a software engineer I avoid JS as much as possible frankly! Its typing semantics are genuinely horrible, personally I'd never consider eschewing typescript in this day and age.
Then again I'm the sort of masochist who thinks we should all be writing Scala so maybe take this with a pinch of salt.
with vibe coding, finding a library that is exhaustively covered is part of being successful. JS is very popular and llms like it, its sort of like moving to an aws shop from an azure shop, just different strokes for different blokes, as long as they leave the money on their way out
It's not just about how many examples of a language exist in the LLM's distribution though, dynamic typing is a poor choice if you're using LLMs for software in my view because it turns compile-time errors into runtime errors which will only be caught if the LLM writes a suitable test; an area that they still leave a fair bit to be desired in.
The whole virtue of dynamic typing is that it reduces cognitive load on the programmer, if you're using LLMs there's no reason to do that in my opinion, you're offloading a bunch of cognitive load to begin with so expressiveness and constraint is more important than human ergonomics. Yes there's loads of JS in an LLM corpus but a lot of it is going to be poor examples, because it's generally quite easy to write JS badly. If you use typescript you're at least forcing a few common hallucinations to produce compile-time errors which the model has immediate feedback for, and you're giving the model more context on what it's seeing.
i also find a robust docs SOT directory of big domains, fallow, madge, knip, ts, and an extra declaritive schema documenation layer on top of migrations schema to be a big help in grounding and keeping rails up
'/j' marks a joke