Agreed, I generally impress colleagues with how fast it is to solve problems with JSON / JS - the big advantage for me is being able to "dump" a portion of program memory to JSON, and then reload that into state of the application. It makes systems much easier to understand when you can peer inside the memory structures. I find by comparison that strongly typed languages end up with a huge amount of boiler plate and abstractions, you start to question which bits/bytes actually matter. JSON reduces a problem space to something meaningful and easily craftable by humans.