I think it's crazy that when I add a string to an inline list, I may need to convert that inline list to a list because this string needs different handling. I think it's crazy that "convert an inline list to a list" is a coherent statement, but that is the nomenclature that they chose.

I don't like that a truncated document is a complete and valid document.

But what is most unappealing is their whitespace handling. I couldn't even figure out how to encode a string with CR line endings. So, I downloaded their python client to see how it did it. Turns out, they couldn't figure it out either:

>>> nt.loads(nt.dumps("\r"),top="str") '\n'

    name: Install dependencies
    run:
        > python -m pip install --upgrade pip
        > pip install pytest
        > if [ -f 'requirements.txt' ]; then pip install -r requirements.txt; fi

We all have to deal with this, but it is beyond stupid.

    [Install Dependencies]
    run=/path/to/install-script

In fact, if I really wanted to test my tests, I'd say that directly testing the corresponding clause is the more comprehensive approach. For example, what if someone accidentally changes the line to read:

    run=/path/to/install-scriptq

So let's keep inline scripts, they are very reasonable methods for just a few commands.

I don't have to re-read manuals describing how to do if/else in Ruby or Java or Lisp, but as soon as yaml and some 'devops' tooling is involved, I have to constantly jump back and forth between the reference and my config.

The main point being that the problem isn't the file format but the products that continue to push it, presumably because hacking stuff on top of `YAML.parse` is less effort than designing something that fits the purpose.

For build systems, I always liked the idea of Gradle where the core functionality was simple and declarative, but with the option to use a real programming language for things that weren't simple. For example, integrating installers or form builders (pre-processing) into a build are things I would consider non-trivial if there aren't official plugins, but it was still relatively easy to do with Gradle.

The biggest problem I always had with Gradle was that I didn't like Groovy and I always though there was a missed opportunity to have a statically typed build system with a solid API/contract and all the fancy tooling like auto-complete that you get with statically typed languages.

I see JSON5 mentioned a lot in the comments. In terms of CI / build systems, I feel like something built with JSON5/TypeScript could be really good. I'd be really happy using TypeScript for configuring things like build systems where there shouldn't really be an argument for needing it to be usable by non-programmers.

Personally I feel like I've spent way to much of my life debugging YAML syntax issues.

[1] https://babashka.org/

    dependencies {
    }

Kotlin DSL is miles ahead of Groovy in terms of discoverability and IDEA integration. With Groovy DSL, most of the build script is highlighted with various degrees of errors and warnings; with Kotlin DSL, if something is highlighted, it is a legitimate error, and vice versa - if no errors are detected by IDEA, then it is almost certain to work.

There were rough spots of IDEA integration a couple years ago, but now it is close to perfect, within Gradle's limits of course (due to sheer dynamic nature of it, some things are just not possible to express in a static fashion, unfortunately). The biggest obstacle to Kotlin DSL use might be that some of the plugins use various Groovy-specifc features which are hard to use from Kotlin, but thankfully most of the plugins either fix those, or are rewritten in Java or Kotlin instead.

I expected it to catch on, but I think a lot of people are sticking with Maven.

I do find it curious that a lot of these tools get seen as basic task runners despite offering much more potential.

* https://ilya-sher.org/2018/06/30/terraform-becomes-a-program...

* https://ilya-sher.org/2018/09/15/aws-cloudformation-became-a...

(There are workarounds, and off-hand I can't think of a great example, but bear with me.)

In the end I wrote a simple console-based mail-client, which used a Lua configuration file. That would generally default to using hashes, and key=value settings, but over the time I used it things got really quite configurable via user-defined callbacks, and functions to return various settings.

For example I wrote a hook called `on_reply_to`, and if you defined that function in your configuration file it would be invoked when you triggered the Reply function. This kind of flexibility was very self-consistent, and easy to add using an embedded real language.

Later I added some hacks to a local fork of GNU Screen, there I just said:

* If the ~/.screenrc file is executable, then execute it, and parse the output.

That let me say "If hostname == foo; do this ; otherwise do this .." and get conditionals and some other things easily. Another example was unbinding all keys, and then only allowing some actions to be bound. (I later submitted "unbindall" upstream, to remove the need for that.)

IMO, it's only declarative when it's a data model which is easily parsed by multiple languages/systems where it's needed.

If something needs the flexibility of a programming language, why not use a real one that's been well tested for writing other programs? These various config file programming systems always end up creating something notorious that everyone tries to avoid having to work on.

Also, I don't think many realize that the stack has evolved since early 00s. XSLT 1.0 was a very limiting language, requiring extensions for many advanced scenarios. But there's XSLT v3.0 these days, and XPath & XQuery v3.1, with some major new features - e.g. maps and lambdas. Granted, this doesn't fix the most basic complaint about XSLT - its insanely verbose syntax - but even then, I'd still take XSLT over ad-hoc YAML-based loops and conditionals.

[1]https://cdk8s.io/

So you write yaml by hand for trivial cases, but once it get complex, you can just drop back to shell/python/ruby/node/whatever, implement any complex logic, and serialize results to plain yaml.

I still don't know how to do arrays in yaml.

Is it new line, tab to same indent or same indent + one space, do I need a dash? Does a dash make it an array or an object?

It's just simply not that big of a deal to add a few quotes and braces to make everything make sense.

The only real issue with Json is the lack of comments and strictness about extra commas.

Me either. If your documents have this property you're likely to tempt people to start trying to process partial documents.

When they do that, they violate Full Recognition Before Processing and likely there's a latent security bug as a result.

Stepping back a bit, YAML is good enough, and this problem has been incrementally bikeshedded since at least the 1970s, it is time to move on. Human-convenient interfaces (like YAML, bash, perl) are fundamentally messy because we are messy. They're prone to opinion and style, as if replacing some part or other will make the high level problem (that's us) go away. Fretting over perfection in UI is an utterly pointless waste of time.

I don't know what NestedText is and find it very difficulty to care, there are far more important problems in life to be concerned with than yet another incremental retake on serialization. I find it hard to consider contributions like this to be helpful or represent progress in any way.

If you can write a bad YAML document because of those mis-features/edge cases, I'd say you've already lost.

Humans are messy, but at the end of the day the data has to go to a program, so a concise and super simple interface has a lot of power to it for humans.

Working at a typical software company with average skill level engineers (including myself), no one likes writing YAML. But everyone is fine with JSON.

I think it's a case of conceptual purity vs what an average engineer would actually want to use. And JSON wins that. If YAML was really better than JSON, we'd all be using that right now.

So does it really matter if YAML is superior if >80% of engineers pick JSON instead?

Conversely, if a markup language is strict enough to prevent every inconsistency, then it's not powerful enough or too cumbersome to use to be generally useful.

If you want conceptual purity (and far fewer footguns), take Dhall.

Nah, in the 1970s we had Lisp S-expressions that completely solved the problem, and everything since then has been regressions on S-expressions due to parenthesis phobia.

After hearing that thing about the country code for Norway, I became convinced that YAML has to just die. Become an ex-markup language. Pine for the fjords. Be a syntax that wouldn't VOOM if you put 4 million volts through it. Join the choir invisible, etc.

This is good: https://noyaml.com/

Erik Naggum had a notoriously NSFW rant about XML (over the top even for him) that I better not link to here, but lots of it applies to YAML as well.

(Sarcasm, just in case.)

Stuff like escape chars were well specified in Lisps of the 1970s (at least the late 1970s), including in Scheme (1975). Floating point conversion is a different matter (it was even messier in the pre-IEEE 754 era than now) but I think the alternatives don't handle it well either. You probably have to use hexadecimal representation for binary floats. Maybe decimal floats will become more widely supported on future hardware.

A type-checked approach can be seen in XMonad, whose config files use Haskell's Read typeclass for the equivalent of typed S-expressions.

1. Use only alists for maps because they prevent off-by-one errors.

2. Allow plists because they're less verbose than alists and use reader macros to distinguish them, and allow the reader macro definitions to be in the same file.

Most of the time I use option 1 because it's simpler.

There's no canonical YAML implementation, and YAML spec is enormous (doubly so if you need to work with stuff like non-quoted strings etc. )

The formal grammar counts as canonical and several implementations are derived from it: https://github.com/yaml/yaml-reference-parser

YAML is patently unsuitable for any use case where the resulting output may require hand editing.

YAML ain't markup language.

I don't know what to make of this statment, it has so much handwaving built-in. The most charitable interpretation I can find is that by 'Human-convenient' you simply meant the quick-and-dirty ideology expressed in Worse Is Better: Does job, makes users contemplate suicide only once per month, isn't too boat-rocking for current infrastructure and tooling.

Taken at face value (without special charitable parsing), this statement is trivially false. Python is often used as a paragon of 'Human-convenience', I sometimes find this trope tiring but whatever Python's merits and vices its _definitely_ NOT messy in design.

Perl is the C++ of scripting languages, it's a very [badly|un] designed language widely mocked by both language designers and users. Lua and tcl instead are languages literally created for the sole exact purpose of (non-) programmers expressing configuration inside of a fixed kernel of code created by other programmers, and look at their design : the whole of tcl's syntax and semantics is a single human-readable sentence, while lua thought it would be funny if 70% of the language involved dictionaries for some reason. These are extremely elegant and minimal designs, and they are brutally efficient and successful at their niches : tcl is EDA's and Network Administration's darling, and lua is used by game artists utterly uninterested in programming to express level design.

'Humans are messy' isn't a satisfactory way to put it. 'Humans love simple rules that get the job done' is more like it. But because the world is very complex and exception-laden, though, simple rules don't hug its contours well. There are two responses to this:

- you can declare it a free-for-all and just have people make up simple rules on the fly as situations come up, that's the Worse Is Better approach. It doesn't work for long because very soon the sheer mountain of simple rules interact and create lovecraftian horrors more complex than anything the world would have thrown at you. Remember that the world itself is animated by extremely simple rules (Maxwell's equations, Evolution by Natural Selection, etc...), it's the multitude and interaction of those simple rules that give it its gargantuan complexity and variety.

- you stop and think about The One Simple Rule To Rule All Rules, a kernel of order that can be extended and added to gradually, consistently and beautifully.

The first approach can be called the 'raster ideology', it's a way of approximating reality by dividing it into a huge part of small, simple 'pixels' and describing each one seperately by simple rules. I'm not sure it's 'easy' or 'convenient', maybe seductive. It promises you can always come up with more rules to describe new patterns and situations, and never ever throw away the old rules. This doesn't work if your problem is the sheer multitude and inconsistency of rules. The second approach is the 'vector ideology', it promises you that there is a small basis of simple rules that will describe your pattern in entirety, and can always be tweaked or added to (consistently!) when new patterns arise, the only catch is that you have to think hard about it first.

Rather short sighted and dismissive to a successful programming language that's evolved over 20+ years. Lua is a great general purpose programming language that specializes not in "game making for non-programmers" but in ease of embedding, extension/extensability, and data description (like a config language). There's a whole section in Programming in Lua[1] to that effect. The fact that it's frequently used in games is credit to it's speed, size and great C API for embedding, not because of any particular catering to game designers.

[1]: https://www.lua.org/pil/10.1.html

Being used by non-programmers utterly uninterested in programming to solve problems is the highest honor any programming language can ever attain, because it means that the language is well-suited to the domain enough (or flexible enough to be made so) that describing problems in it is no different than writing thoughts or design documents in natural language. This is the single most flattering thing you can ever say about a language, not a dismissive remark.

JSON schemas exist and they’re ok for relatively simple things. For more complex cases I find myself wishing I could just turn Typescript into some kind of schema validation for JSON.

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, and whether it's powerful and expressive enough for your use case, but you can use typescript-json-schema¹ for this, and validate with eg ajv.

¹https://github.com/YousefED/typescript-json-schema

https://github.com/sinclairzx81/typebox

As an alternative, the encoding/decoding roundtrip using protobuf seems reasonable to me, catches the footgun of using floating-point version numbers (it becomes a parse error), whitespace/multiline concatenation being more obvious, and allowing comments (compared to JSON):

  ( cat << EOF
  # yes, comments are allowed
  name: "Python package"
  on: "push"
  build {
    python_version: ["3.6", "3.7", "3.8", "3.9", "3.10"]
    steps: [
      {
        name: "Install dependencies"
          run:
            "python -m pip install --upgrade pip\n"
            "pip install pytest\n"
            "if [ -f 'requirements.txt' ]; then pip install -r requirements.txt; fi\n"
      },
      {
        name: "Test with pytest"
        run: "pytest\n"
      }
    ]
  }
  EOF
  ) | protoc --encode=Config config.proto  | protoc --decode=Config config.proto
  
  name: "Python package"
  on: "push"
  build {
    python_version: "3.6"
    python_version: "3.7"
    python_version: "3.8"
    python_version: "3.9"
    python_version: "3.10"
    steps {
      name: "Install dependencies"
      run: "python -m pip install --upgrade pip\npip install pytest\nif [ -f \'requirements.txt\' ]; then pip   install -r requirements.txt; fi\n"
    }
    steps {
      name: "Test with pytest"
      run: "pytest\n"
    }
  }

JSON schemas exist and can be applied to yaml and this is supported by many editors. For example this vscode extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redhat.v...

It's strange to see so many complains about "missing tooling" that actually exists and is well supported.

Unfortunately YAML already got type support, which made it easier to roundtrip, but also insecure. Creating a type calls constructors with possible insecure side effects. Which was eg used to hack Movable Type.

(I agree with you about comments though)

JSON5 has many advantages:

* Superset of JSON without being wildly different. I know YAML is a superset of JSON but it's completely different too. Insane.

* Unambiguous grammar. YAML has way too many big structure decisions that are made by unclear and minor formatting differences. My work's YAML data is full of single-element lists that shouldn't be lists for example.

* Comments, trailing commas

* It's a subset of Javascript so basically nothing new to learn.

* It has an unambiguous extension (.json5). I think JSONC would be a reasonable option but everyone uses the same extension as JSON (.json) so you can never be sure which you are using. E.g. `tsconfig.json` is JSONC but `package.json` is just JSON (to everyone's annoyance).

* Doesn't add too much of Javascript. I wouldn't recommend JSON6 because it's just making the format too complicated for little benefit.

- it has good editor support (VsCode) - has comments support - Support jsonschema

Only thing missing is trailing commas, but i would rather live without trailing commas than tooling support

> - it has good editor support (VsCode)

Unfortunately it doesn't really because of the extension issue I mentioned. Certain file names (like `tsconfig.json`) are whitelisted to have JSONC support, but any random file `foo.json` will be treated as JSON and give you annoying lints if you put comments and trailing commas in.

That's a fairly recent change I think.

    {
      "name": "my-tool",
      "#comment-1": "Don’t change the version!",
      "version": "42.1337.0"
    }

Also, this doesn't let you put comments at the top of the file, or before a list item, or at the end of a line.

If you're going to change your JSON tooling to handle comments of some kind, you might as well go all the way to JSONC.

This situation makes me feel rather silly

Aren't we past basic false dichotomies?

   ifnot:
    - foo
   then_clearly:
    -
       'some bar'

As someone who has used XML configs they have a few problems:

- technical: missing comments are mentioned multiple times here so I will mention that while XML has comments they cannot be nested.

- socially: for some reason (maybe because XML is structured enough that this doesn't immediately collapse?) XML tends to just grow and grow. People start programming in XML too, and not only using XSLT or other standard approaches but also in completely proprietary ways.

At one project someone even wrote an authorization framework in Apache Tiles which allowed one to create roles using somewhere between 600 and 5000 lines of XML pr role. The benefit was of course that you could update the roles without touching the Java code.

(In case it isn't immediately obvious: it would have been extremely much simpler to edit it in Java, and people who know enough Java to fix it are available at the right price, the XML system had to be learned at work.)

Personally I just want it to be kept simple:

- a settings.local.ini and default settings in settings.ini or something to that effect

- if necessary, just use a code file: config.ts works just as well, or config.js if it needs to be adjustable at runtime without transpilation.

This is most certainly true, however with GZip thrown into the mix, it's not quite as bad as one might imagine: https://www.codeproject.com/articles/604720/json-vs-xml-some...

It compresses pretty decently and doesn't have too much of an overhead, in the example it being around 10% larger than JSON when compressed.

I'd argue that if one were to swap out JSON for XML within all the requests that an average webpage needs for some unholy reason, the overall increase in page size would be much less than that, because huge amounts of modern sites are images, as well as bits of JS that won't be executed but also won't be removed because our tree shaking isn't perfect.

Edit: as someone who writes a good deal of Java in their dayjob, i feel like commenting about the verbosity of XML might be unwelcome. I'll only say that in some cases it can be useful to have elements that have been structured and described in verbose ways, especially when you don't have the slightest idea about what API or data you're looking at when seeing it for the first time (the same way how WSDL files for SOAP could provide discoverability).

However, it all goes downhill due to everything looking like a nail once you have a hammer - most of the negative connotations with XML in my mind actually come from Java EE et al and how it tried doing dynamic code loading through XML configuration (e.g. web.xml, context.xml, server.xml and bean configuration), which was unpleasant.

On an unrelated note, XSD is the one truly redeeming factor of XML, the equivalent of which for JSON took a while to get there (JSON Schema). Similarly, WSDL was a good attempt, whereas for JSON there first was WADL which didn't gain popularity, though at least now OpenAPI seems to have a pretty stable place, even if the tooling will still take a while to get there (e.g. automatically generating method stubs for a web API with a language's HTTP client).

How WSDL and the code generation around it worked, was that you'd have a specification of the web API (much like OpenAPI attempts to do), which you could feed into any number of code generators, to get output code which has no coupling to the actual generator at runtime, whereas Pyotr is geared more towards validation and goes into the opposite direction: https://pyotr.readthedocs.io/en/latest/client/

The best analogy that i can think of is how you can also do schema first application development - you do your SQL migrations (ideally in an automated way as well) and then just run a command locally to generate all of the data access classes and/or models for your database tables within your application. That way, you save your time for 80% of the boring and repetitive stuff while minimizing the risks of human error and inconsistencies, with nothing preventing you from altering the generated code if you have specific needs (outside of needing to make it non overrideable, for example, a child class of a generated class). Of course, there's no reason why this can't be applied to server code either - write the spec first and generate stubs for endpoints that you'll just fill out.

Similarly there shouldn't be a need for a special client to generate stubs for OpenAPI, the closest that Python in particular has for now is this https://github.com/openapi-generators/openapi-python-client

However, for some reason, model driven development never really took off, outside of niche frameworks, like JHipster: https://www.jhipster.tech/

Furthermore, for whatever reason formal specs for REST APIs also never really got popular and aren't regarded as the standard, which to me seems silly: every bit of client code that you write will need a specific version to work against, which should be formalized.

same as to why REST is now not a hot thing anymore, the idea that your API is just a dumb wrapper around data model is poor api design.

API-driven development didn't really took off either, that is write your spec in grpc/OpenAPI and have the plumbing code generated in both ends. It's technically already there with various tools, but because of dogma like "code generation is bad", quality of code generators, or whatever reason, we're still writting "API code"

Hmm, i don't think that i've ever heard of this. Would you care to provide any sources, since that sounds like an interesting stance to take?

So far, it seems like frameworks like Django don't have an issue with CLI tools to generate bits of code, i.e. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/intro/tutorial01/

  If this is your first time using Django, you’ll have to take care of some initial setup. Namely, you’ll need to auto-generate some code that establishes a Django project – a collection of settings for an instance of Django, including database configuration, Django-specific options and application-specific settings.
  
  $ django-admin startproject mysite

I don't see why CLI tools would be treated any differently or why code generation should be considered an anti-pattern since it's additive in nature and is entirely optional, hence asking to learn more.

I need to clarify: when I say that "code generation" is an anti-pattern, I'm talking about the traditional, two-step process where you generate some code in one process, and then execute it in another. But Python works really well with a different type of "code generation".

Someone once said that the only thing missing from Python is a macro language; but that is not true - Python has its own macro language, and it's called Python.

Python is dynamically evaluated and executed, so there is no reason why we need two separate steps when generating code dynamically; in Python, the right way is not to dynamically construct the textual representation of code, but rather to dynamically construct runtime entities (classes, functions etc), and then use them straight away, in the same process.

Unless you're dynamically building hundreds of such constructs (and if you do you have a bigger problem), any performance impact is negligible.

Ahh, then it feels like we're talking about different things here! The type of code generation that i was talking about was more along the lines of tools that allow you to automatically write some of the repetitive boilerplate code that's needed for one reason or another, such as objects that map to your DB structure and so on. Essentially things that a person would have to do manually otherwise, as opposed to introducing preprocessors and macros.

For a really nice example of this, have a look at the Ruby on Rails generators here: https://medium.com/@simone.catley/ruby-on-rails-generators-a...

Wait, it the opposite. XML is designed to indicate context, and JSON is designed to hide context, you have a bunch of braces in place of context there, no matter where you are it's braces all the way down, like lisp.

Sure, why not? XML rocks. I'll take it over JSON for many purposes.

Yaml and toml are fine if you keep it simple. JSON direly needs comments support (but of course wasn’t designed to be used as a human config file format so that’s kind of on us). And not just “Jsonc that sometimes might work in places.”

Beyond that, I think we generally have all the things we need and I don’t personally think we need yet another yaml. =)

* JSON streaming is a bit of a mess. You can either do JSONL, or keep the entire document in memory at once. I usually end up going with JSONL.

* JSON itself doesn't permit trailing commas. I can measure the amount of time that I've wasted re-opening JSON files after accidentally adding a comma in days, not hours.

* JSON has weakly specified numbers. The specification itself defines the number type symbolically, as (essentially) `[0-9]+`. It's consequently possible (and common) for different parsers to behave differently on large numbers. YAML also, unfortunately, has this problem.

* Similarly: JSON doesn't clearly specify how parsers should behave in the presence of duplicate keys. More opportunity for confusion and bugs.

On the other hand, XML allows comments, yet I've never seen XML parsers incompatibilities.

    <NameID>[email protected]<!--XMLCOMMENT-->.evil.com</NameID>

Those are not in compliance with the relevant spec. We need to treat them as damage and confront them on the technical and social level.

Easiest way to demonstrate how wrong that is, is to throw in a comment in the example document ;)

Arrays with hole are a JS-only feature

JSON is defined by the spec. The people who wrote the spec think otherwise[0].

[0]: https://www.json.org/json-en.html

> Arrays with hole are a JS-only feature.

There are other langauges that allow arrays with missing elements.

The document > {1:2 3:[4 5]}

can only be "commafied" to > {1:2, 3:[4, 5]}

> There are other langauges that allow arrays with missing elements.

But javascript is the only one that gave JSON the JS in its name

    ---
    foo: 1
    ...

I believe that's only true if one were to load YAML via the "SAX"-style per-event stream, and not the "object materialization" that normal apps use (aka `yaml.load_all` or JAX-B objects) since in those more data-object centric views, where would one put the processing events for those markers?

I also originally expected `yaml.parse(...)` to eat them as it does for comments and extraneous whitespace, but no, it does in fact return dedicated stream events for them, so TIL

I also started advocating in-language configuration files (Python for Python, but also Lua for Lua, etc) a number of years ago because it lets you do really useful things (like functionally generating values, importing shared subsets of data, storing executable references, and ensuring that two keys return the same values without manual copy/paste) all without needing to spec and use Yet Another Thing™ that does only a fraction of what the programming language you're already using already does.

Things that get compiled can't really use it without recompilation.

While true, parsing it is still a minefield because it's very underspecified: http://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html

The desire to use a single interchange format for all data is the problem. There are plenty of reasons to support comments and minor syntax issues that JSON itself dislikes for human consumable and interactive JSON. I'd think software JSON could be just that.

For machine-to-machine generated payloads JSON is good enough.

Clean, of course to them means some bizarre aesthetic notion of removing as much as possible. Only it’s taken to an extreme. I wonder if the same people also think books would be better with all punctuation be removed to make it look “clean”?

It’s unhealthy minimalism, causes more problems than it solves. As soon as I see a project using YAML I cringe and try to find an alternative because god knows what other poor choices the developer has made. In that sense, YAML can be considered a red herring and I’m usually right. The last project I used that adopted an overly complex and build-breaking YAML configuration syntax had other problems hiding under the covers, and in some cases couldn’t parse it’s own syntax due to YAML’s overly broad but at the same time opinionated syntax.

Just say no to YAML.

Only AFTER YAML had been around and in use for a few years did those geniuses actually realize that they had made a mistake in naming it something that it's not, and retroactively changed the name "YAML" to mean "YAML Ain't Markup Language", which was a too clever by half way of whitewashing the fact that they originally CLAIMED it was "Yet Another Markup Language", since they had no idea what a markup language actually was.

I prefer to use markup languages and data definition languages that were designed by people who are situationally aware enough to know what the difference between a markup language and a data definition language is, please.

Hard pass on YAML, whatever it stands for this week.

Here were my thoughts on the options.

JSON - No comments -> impossible

XML - Unreadable

YAML - 2nd place. Meaningful indentation also made me worried someone was going to not understand why their file didn't work. The lack of quotes around strings was frustrating.

TOML - 1st place. Simpler than YAML to read & parse. It truly seems 'obvious' like the name says.

I haven't encountered any situations where I wish I had more than TOML offers.

Check this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523194

I don't see Kubernetes switching to TOML anytime soon!

^https://toml.io/en/v1.0.0#inline-table

Even XML doesn't make you repeat the higher level keys!

https://www.terraform.io/docs/language/syntax/json.html

More people should give it a try. Very reminiscent of old Windows INI files and Java properties.

All we need is to revise official JSON standard(ECMA 404) to include comments.

It’s not essential, but if we’re already changing the format we might as well?

That would be a step back for GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, Google App Engine, and a bunch of other projects which use YAML and seldom encounter the Norway problem. https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/why/implicit-typing-removed/

It is pretty niche, but attempts to improve upon JSON in a multitude of ways, one of which is the support for comments: https://spec.json5.org/#comments

http://hyperrealm.github.io/libconfig/libconfig_manual.html#...

It does need an XPath traversal and search query format for application use and data references.

I recently read a piece by Joel Spolsky that resonated with me (even though my career is not nearly as long as his).

> I took a few stupid years trying to be the CEO of a growing company during which I didn’t have time to code, and when I came back to web programming, after a break of about 10 years, I found Node, React, and other goodies, which are, don’t get me wrong, amazing? Really really great? But I also found that it took approximately the same amount of work to make a CRUD web app as it always has, and that there were some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago. [0]

It makes me wonder if we're really focusing on the right stuff. Maybe there's lower hanging fruit somewhere that's more valuable than focusing on fundamentally subjective things like syntax.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...

It’s a deterministic subset of Python. This means that if you have complex or repetitive configurations, you can use loops and functions to structure them. But it’s impossible to write an infinite loop or recursion.

[1] https://github.com/edn-format/edn

[2] https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format

As a sysadmin, YAML seems nice until you have actually done anything more advanced with it. See Julien Pivotto's presentation about some of its pitfalls: https://www.slideshare.net/roidelapluie/yaml-magic?next_slid... Btw. Jsonnet doesn't seem too bad either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiQnSZ4SOnw and here some examples: https://jsonnet.org/ but in my book, EDN still wins.

Or if you really must, then simply interrupt processes that loop infinitely, and fix the bugs that caused it.

You know, like you already do when you have an infinite loop.

Infinite loops are not the end of the world, you know. Processes can be interrupted, and computers have reset buttons.

The underlying conundrum is:

- systems need to be configured,

- human-readability is obviously necessary at some level,

- configuration is often very "compressible" (needs loops, needs variables to be maintainable), but

- system-writers don't know the structure of your data, the axes on which you'd want to compress things, the best abstractions for you.

Templating languages are an obvious direction, but they're uniformly bad. If they have limited expressiveness you'll run into the limits. Maybe there are templating languages with good unit testing frameworks, but I haven't seen them. "Look at the expanded diff" doesn't scale. And generating gobs of human-readable "data" (in a format that supports comments!) is very wasteful.

It's still resources to detect loops, it often involves introspection or privileged views; it's simply easier to prevent loops.

If it has first-class functions, how can you avoid infinite recursion? Like, what stops me from running the omega combinator in it? This is why Meson (a similar language) does not allow those kinds of shenanigans, to keep the language non-Turing-complete.

It's a cool idea to do configuration in a subset of Python but now you have to go implement that subset in every language.

I will look into this further.

Starlark is indeed deterministic and guaranteed to terminate (the Go implementation has a flag that allows recursion, but it's off by default), but these are two orthogonal properties.

I like CSV (and similar delimited files) it's less verbose than anything else for tabular data.

I like JSON for data transfer, you know the data types, it's succinct, and readable.

I personally don't need anything else.

I'm more likely to Yacc my own config format than use YAML or JSON personally.

JSON is great as an output format for data though.

Schema validation, code completion on IDEs, endless amount of tooling including graphical visualisation, a language for data transformation and queries, and.... wait for it... comments!

XSDs is something I think people need to pay more attention to when dealing with XML; the type system that the W3C XSD standard lays out (when used effectively) really does relieve much of the pain that people experience with XML.

My benchmark for yaml/JSON alternatives is "how would I feel explaining it to a busy, sceptical client?"

If the intended audience is purely developers, then sure. JSON (with the addition of comments and trailing commas) is just fine.

White space has the additional advantage of agreeing with itself. Other demarcations can have issues where the indentation and the structure contradict each other.

Please stop making code easy for non-coders. They don’t want to read it. They never did. They just want this damn box to work.

Just put the file in the root folder, and keep it as simple as possible and you should be fine? I mean, if they manage to write yaml correctly and consistently C is no match?

My benchmark is this: can an autoformatter do its job every time without breaking something that's technically working right now but possibly formatted wrong?

Every data format that cannot comply with this contains in it a huge waste of time. Even as a python programmer, I extend the same rule to programming languages.

I'm not clear exactly what the "it" here refers to but as I mentioned in other comments it's fairly self-evident that indentation is easier to visually parse than braces. A simple thought experiment - would you find it easier to skim read code where the indentation was consistent with the bracing or where it was inconsistent? Your brain registers the indentation first and you only resort to counting braces if there's a reason to doubt the former.

Nobody advocates for "braces are better without indentation".

This surely implies that (practically) everyone agrees indentation is carrying most of the weight of visual indication of structure.

Of course "everyone" might be wrong - but that's a fairly tricky corner to defend.

^^^ THIS ^^^

With that said if they weren't complaining about white space they'd be complainit about missing semicolons, missing/extra commas, missig equals signs, missing closing )]} or whatever.

I wish it could be displayed with braces though, I wonder if someone already has built that as an extension for editing / viewing yaml files.

That's false. http://p3rl.org/JSON::XS#JSON-and-YAML

I can definitely think of a broad range of people where I'd be happy to recommend they use text files for config and data but I wouldn't be happy if those text files needed to follow the rules of JSON syntax.

I mean - to some extent I would rather not edit JSON. It's not a terribly ergonomic experience. If I had to design a format for my own use, it would be indentation based and probably look a little bit like YAML, Markdown or similar.

If it was code, an indentation error would often not compile or show errors or fail tests.

Configuration in YAML is much worse: most of the time an indentation error goes undetected until an application starts misbehaving.

Significant whitespace is perfectly ok for code but a huge footgun for YAML

But I find it incredibly annoying to estimate indentation when lines are wrapped in an editor (or webpage). Or, to a lesser extent but still throws me off, when multiple blocks end at the same line. Or when pasting blocks into another block, and having to double check to make sure the indentation was carried over correctly. I like editors that visually show indentation characters.

Or, NODE <name> .. END .

it makes a difference on how it is parsed, so it's more than a devs preference

Personally I mostly use indent to read code, so requiring that the indent matches the semantic nesting makes it much easier for me to understand.

I get the original was talking about client facing config files. I'd rather see INI style config files personally.

If you're writing ugly code, braces or spaces won't save you. Just don't write ugly code.* Write it like the next person to view your code is an axe murder that knows where you live, so don't make them mad. You can minify later.

*I'm ignoring Perl, as it's always ugly

Truncate YAML and in most cases you still have valid YAML.

For example, to set the maximum message size to by 10Mb and to set the timeout to be 30 seconds:

    echo 10000000 > /var/qmail/control/databytes
    echo 30 > /var/qmail/control/timeoutsmtpd

Dictionaries are just subdirectories with one file per entry, for example this is how aliases are defined to qmail:

    echo fred > /var/qmail/alias/.qmail-postmaster
    echo fred > /var/qmail/alias/.qmail-mailer-daemon

DJB also created a simple, portable encoding for serializing data called netstrings, see [2]. XML, YAML, JSON, TOML, and INI files all have some advantages over netstrings, but netstrings are simple to understand and simple to parse correctly.

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/qmail/1565926285/ch04.h...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netstring

For one of my art projects I make YAML files that describe the front side, back side, and web side of a "three sided card". I generate these out of several templates, currently using ordinary string templating.

I'd love to be able to load a YAML file and add something programatically to the list and have the list stay in the same format that it was in, so if it was a

   [1,2,3]

   [1,2,3,4]

   - 1
   - 2
   - 3

   - 1
   - 2
   - 3
   - 4

    import assert from 'assert'
    import { parseDocument } from 'yaml'
    
    const flowDoc = parseDocument(`[1,2,3]`)
    flowDoc.add(4)
    assert(flowDoc.toString(), '[ 1, 2, 3, 4 ]\n')
    
    const blockDoc = parseDocument(`\
    - 1
    - 2
    - 3`)
    blockDoc.add(4)
    assert(
      blockDoc.toString(),
      `\
    - 1
    - 2
    - 3
    - 4
    `
    )

E.g. I tried exactly the same thing, and it was quiet difficult with Rust. Because the way to parse it usually is with serde and it just removes the AST of course.

In the end I gave up, and just used JSON for my use case.

"<em>This</em> is a markup language" since there is text which is marked up.

YAML/JSON is a way to serialise fairly common data structures (arrays/lists, hashes/dictionaries, numbers, strings, bools, etc.)

Incidentally, if you can seamlessly replace XML with something like JSON, then you probably aren't using the 'markup' bit of XML.

YAML: Probably not so great after all (arp242.net)