D. Crockford on JSON: "An influence was Rebol, a shame it’s not more popular"

JSON had a lot of influences on its design. It didn’t just come out of my head. It’s based on a lot of things that I had observed over the years. The first – maybe the greatest – influence was Lisp. The thing that was brilliant about Lisp was it used exactly the same representation for programs and data. Originally, the idea was that you would have programs that could act on themselves as data, and do interesting things. … Another influence was Rebol. Rebol’s a more modern language, but with some very similar ideas to Lisp, in that it’s all built upon a representation of data which is then executable as programs. But it’s a much richer thing syntactically. Rebol is a brilliant language, and it’s a shame it’s not more popular, because it deserves to be.