I almost stopped reading at the difference between "89" and 89 being something bad that risks making your program crash.
What a moronic diatribe.
TOML being typed makes it excellent compared to INI.
Nobody with anything resembling a CS degree on their wall should be defending nonsense like "castable strings", and the proliferation of string conversions into the application layer. Let alone in C or C++.
Postel's law is only half right.
You should be conservative in what you generate (don't probe every obscure corner spec of a representation, if you can avoid it), and reject all inputs that do not conform to the specification.
Programs shouldn't react in uexpected ways to bad inputs, like crash, or allow an attacker to take control. But they shouldn't try to reinterpret bad inputs as good, either. That's folly.
The only reason to follow Postel's law is economic gain at the expense of the technological ecosystem.
If your web browser accepts broken HTML and renders it, whereas the competing browser rejects it, that competing browser is better for the web, but looks buggy to the naive user base, which will prefer your web browser.
Postel's law was used as one of the weapons in the browser wars, whose legacy negatively affects the web even today.
> I almost stopped reading at the difference between "89" and 89 being something bad that risks making your program crash.
I can only commend you for not taking a few minutes to consider whether it was worth continuing when the essay starts with praising postel's law, possibly the worst idea in the field since "let me just run that code I received over a socket".
What a moronic diatribe.
TOML being typed makes it excellent compared to INI.
Nobody with anything resembling a CS degree on their wall should be defending nonsense like "castable strings", and the proliferation of string conversions into the application layer. Let alone in C or C++.
Postel's law is only half right.
You should be conservative in what you generate (don't probe every obscure corner spec of a representation, if you can avoid it), and reject all inputs that do not conform to the specification.
Programs shouldn't react in uexpected ways to bad inputs, like crash, or allow an attacker to take control. But they shouldn't try to reinterpret bad inputs as good, either. That's folly.
The only reason to follow Postel's law is economic gain at the expense of the technological ecosystem.
If your web browser accepts broken HTML and renders it, whereas the competing browser rejects it, that competing browser is better for the web, but looks buggy to the naive user base, which will prefer your web browser.
Postel's law was used as one of the weapons in the browser wars, whose legacy negatively affects the web even today.