This entire argument is a bit of a honey-pot on my part, because the real answer is "Neither is ideal; the tooling around the language should allow the developer to switch back-and-forth arbitrarily, as needed. It should also allow sorting of named arguments."
Since I don't get that tooling for wire-protocol content(1), I prefer named properties there because the alternative is usually some nasty flavor of binary alignment or picking semantics out of a densely-packed forest of newline-stripped character streams. But the correct answer in an actual programming language is "Both. Your IDE should make it easy to toggle the names on and off for positional arguments."
If a dev house is already using JSON for all the reasons one might do so, the flat presentation given by the RFC is the right presentation. But the real correct answer is "match your tools to the problem and you don't have to trade off between brevity and clarity."
(1) unless I do. gRPC is a treat to work with because it's thin on-the-wire but the Chrome devtool extensions give you the context. It's not the right solution for the JSON patch protocol because, well, right there in the name... It's JSON. But it's the solution I'd actually recommend to a team putting something new together if they don't need to interface to the outside world / aren't concerned the outside world will balk at a basically binary-on-the-wire data format.
Since I don't get that tooling for wire-protocol content(1), I prefer named properties there because the alternative is usually some nasty flavor of binary alignment or picking semantics out of a densely-packed forest of newline-stripped character streams. But the correct answer in an actual programming language is "Both. Your IDE should make it easy to toggle the names on and off for positional arguments."
If a dev house is already using JSON for all the reasons one might do so, the flat presentation given by the RFC is the right presentation. But the real correct answer is "match your tools to the problem and you don't have to trade off between brevity and clarity."
(1) unless I do. gRPC is a treat to work with because it's thin on-the-wire but the Chrome devtool extensions give you the context. It's not the right solution for the JSON patch protocol because, well, right there in the name... It's JSON. But it's the solution I'd actually recommend to a team putting something new together if they don't need to interface to the outside world / aren't concerned the outside world will balk at a basically binary-on-the-wire data format.