Yaml is the language nobody needed. All we wanted was a better JSON format that supports comments and doesn’t crash with an extra comma as the end of a list, eg: [1,2,3,]
This format is unreadable on mobile, it keeps opening up my keyboard and scrolling up a bit when it does.<p>I understand and appreciate the "why" of the format, but this also could have been a non-editable "editor-like" presentation and achieved the same result.
Yeah theres some problem, but reading a multiline code block (like github actions bash script) as an indent-escaped string is so much better than having to understand crazy triple-escaped characters like "sed \"\\\\\\"name1\\\\\\\"\""
I will die on the hill that TOML should be used for the vast majority of what YAML's used for today. There are times a full language is needed, but I've seen so many YAML files that use none of the features YAML has with all of the footguns.
I find the configuration complexity clock always valuable in framing conversations like this: <a href="https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-complexity-clock.html?m=1" rel="nofollow">https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-comple...</a>
I'm a big fan of YAML after coming from JSON and, later, ProtoBuf's many definition formats while working at Google---but it's true that there are a lot of oddities in YAML's magical parsing. I'm grateful for the many ways it's possible to quickly an naturally define simple hierarchies of data (for example, in a docker-compose file).<p>This website does the rare thing of, after complaining, providing a long list of alternatives. It's really nice.
YAML's idea of human readability misses the mark. Especially anchors. They're the worst tools for abstraction.<p>JSON with functions as the high level format and JSON as the low level format is the way to go. Examples include Nix and Jsonnet. They're much nicer to deal with and less error prone.
> # Anyone wondering why their first seven Kubernetes clusters deploy just fine, and the eighth fails?<p>Yay, octal numbers! But don't panic, lots of supposed C programmers fall for exactly the same trick when prefixing numbers with `0`.
Yawn. I'll keep using XML. While many waste their youth pointlessly reinventing XSDs in YAML/JSON/TOML/JSON5/HJSON, I'll still be here. Living. Content.