Yes, what's the point of JsonObject at all? Why JsonString when there is String? Why JsonArray when there is List? JDK only needs a function to convert from JSON format to the normal data structures it already has and back.

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pron 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Because JSON types don't cleanly map to Java types. For example, a JSON number could be an int, a long, a double, a BigInteger, or a BigDecimal. Which of them the Java code wants is not something you can deduce (most generally, you could represent all JSON numbers as BigDecimal, but that's not very convnient in Java code, so in most cases you'd want to convert that to a primitive type of your choosing anyway). A JSON array is heterogeneous, while Java code typically want to be homogeneous. Representing a JSON array as a `List<Object>` won't work because the conversion of the element types is ambiguous (e.g. numbers).

	▲	prpl an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah you could go with just Number though, and then keep almost everything a BigInteger/BigDecimal under the covers (or dynamically choose the correct class)
	▲	Hackbraten an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Good point for parsing. However, the example is about serialization. What mapping ambiguity do you see there?

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dtech 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's pretty normal, almost all libs work this way. This way you can parse the JSON string into the matching data structure or print it into a string, and when building you can ensure it's valid JSON.