That's a big pet peeve for me as well! Only thing remaining now is those pesky colons (edit: was semi-colons) that everyone and their mother seems to place in their new formats. Just get rid of them already!

Who wants to type `{name: "pveierland"}` when you could just do `{name "pveierland"}`?!

Not a fan, it looks kinda alright when you are using a string like that, but {num 5, val 4} looks alien to me. If you used this style in a programming language you'd even get {num var} which is even worse.

capableweb

Alien is not a reason something is bad, just that's it's unusual. JSON was a bit alien when it first arrived as well, as everyone was used to XML at the time.

`{num 5, val 4}` looks fine to me, but we can do even better! We already know objects/maps are always in pairs, so we don't really need that comma either. Just do `{num 5 val 4}` and we save yet another unnecessary characters.

Of course, I didn't come up with this format myself, what I actually want JSON to be is EDN (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) which is a standalone format but also directly used in Clojure, so it already exists inside a programming language and works very well. There keys are strings though, so you example would end up being `{"num" 5 "val" 5 "person" var}`, where commas are optional.