Douglas Crockford is an American computer programmer, writer, and lecturer best known for the JSON data interchange format. On his own site he describes JSON as a format he “discovered” rather than invented, framing it as a minimal data notation drawn from constructs already present in JavaScript. He developed and promoted the format while working at State Software, Inc., and published the canonical description of it at json.org.
The json.org site, which Crockford maintains, presents JSON as “a lightweight data-interchange format” that is “easy for humans to read and write” and “easy for machines to parse and generate.” It notes that the format is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language Standard, ECMA-262 3rd Edition (December 1999), and points to the formal standard, ECMA-404.
Crockford is also widely recognized for what he calls the discovery that JavaScript, contrary to prevailing opinion at the time, “has good parts.” His bio describes this as the basis of his influential book “JavaScript: The Good Parts” (O’Reilly, 2008), and a later book “How JavaScript Works.” He calls the good-parts insight “the first important discovery of the Twenty First Century.”
His career spans entertainment technology at Atari and Lucasfilm, web work at Yahoo! and PayPal, and the founding of several companies including State Software. Throughout this work he has emphasized secure programming languages and the safety of the web platform, and he developed JavaScript tooling such as the static code analyzer JSLint and the minifier JSMin.