November 1, 2025
Standards Wars: Duper Edition
Show HN: Duper – The Format That's Super
Friendlier JSON? Duper drops in; half cheer 'finally', half groan 'not another one'
TLDR: Duper is a friendlier take on JSON that adds nicer typing and readability while staying compatible. The crowd split fast: memes about “too many standards,” demands for a formal spec, a practical “editor plugin” plan, and a hot debate over which format AIs can actually output—why this matters for configs and APIs.
A new format called Duper just walked onto the Hacker News stage promising a friendlier upgrade to JSON, the plain text format that shuttles data around the web. It claims easier-to-read files, clearer names, and extras like tuples and raw bytes, all while staying compatible with JSON. Fans see it as cleaner configs and more readable app data. Skeptics? They instantly fired the bat signal for the classic standards meme with XKCD #927, basically yelling: “We don’t need Yet Another Format.” The vibe: hopeful tinkerers vs. burned-by-history veterans.
Then the practical crowd arrived. One commenter pitched a no-drama hack: let people write Duper in editors and auto-convert to JSON on save, like a prettier paint job with stock parts underneath. Another demanded receipts: “Where’s the formal grammar?”—translation: show the rulebook, not just a pretty demo. The hottest twist? An AI angle: some argue the format that wins will be the one large language models (chatty AI tools) can produce reliably—hinting JSON still rules, while XML isn’t dead either. Between memes, spec wars, and tool talk, the drama circles one question: is Duper the friendly helper we use behind the scenes—or just the latest contestant in the eternal format beauty pageant
Key Points
- •Duper is a human-friendly extension of JSON with explicit types and semantic identifiers.
- •The format targets configuration files, REST APIs, and data interchange as primary use cases.
- •Duper supports comments, trailing commas, unquoted keys, integers, tuples, bytes, raw strings, and identifiers.
- •Duper does not support date and time types but is described as unambiguous, simple, and JSON-compatible.
- •A comparison indicates Duper is less popular than JSON, JSON5, HJSON, and YAML, while maintaining broad feature support.