Reminds me of
Friendly reminder if you prefer dealing with JSON - YAML is a superset of JSON, so any valid JSON is also valid YAML.
That’s more of a weakness of yaml. There’s so many ways to specify the exact same thing. Not exactly what you need for configuration files maintained by multiple people. It easily becomes an big incoherent mess.
In JSON the default way is the only way. Nice and coherent.
I agree that YAML is painful and it really seems like it's had a lot of feature creep.
JSON is painful in its own way too, though. There's a lot of syntax noise from things like braces, quotation marks, etc, so it's easy to make a mistake. Regular JSON doesn't allow trailing commas.
YAML tried to solve some of that, and did succeed in some ways, but introduced its own issues.
TOML seems great to me, but maybe it has its own issues. TOML actually has defined data formats for things like dates (both offset and local) and times, which is missing from both JSON and YAML so every app ends up doing it its own way.
Found out the hard way that no, it's not.. there are a few valid json files that most yaml parsers choke on
What's the original?
The Future: More of the Present by Jake Likes Onions
https://jakelikesonions.com/post/158707858999/the-future-more-of-the-present
Home Assistant back in 2019..
It's been satisfying watching my configuration.yaml file shrink over the years as more and more things get handled by the UI.
Is Yaml bad ?
Yes, a bit. But that's not the problem.
The problem is that the current fashion of devops is done through piles and piles of badly defined YAML. If it used any other configuration language, it would be just as bad.
It isn't "bad", as it does have a purpose. It's just fucking annoying to work with.
https://docs.platform.sh/learn/overview/yaml/what-is-yaml.html
There are plugins that go back and forth between JSON and YAML so as you might expect it's similar. Unlike JSON, spacing has semantic meaning, which can be a little annoying, especially when cutting and pasting. It's nice in that configs aren't cluttered up with open and close braces. It could be annoying AF if you're a tabs instead of spaces person but idk because I'm a spaces person.
I like YAML for config over .config files but it's not a big deal either way. It just encourages better organization of settings because the hierarchical structure demands it while .config let's you just drop a setting anywhere in the file. But it's valid to have the opposite preference for the exact same reasons.
I'll answer your question with a question. Why does YAML support sexagesimal? (that's base 60)
ports: - 22:22Becomes
{ "ports": [1342] }not at all. it's used for configuration and stuff. having a lot of it can be a real bummer depending on the context. like a puppet config or perhaps a super weird docker compose setup. I've never heard anyone complain about the markup though. it's like blaming json for a crap api or something or idk blaming the coffee cup for burnt coffee 🤷
It's just another structured data format. It's used for a lot more than config. It's also how you define commands and etc for Ansible. Like how a Maven project is defined in XML or a NodeJS package has its JSON.
Sure they're still "just" data formats on their own, but what they're used for is genuinely just as important as what it is. I really doubt XML would've held on like it has without HTML being the web.
For some little config it's fine, but it's horrible when used when you have thousands upon thousands of lines of it. Lots of DevOps tools tend to use it like a fully-blown turing-complete programming language, and each has a different DSL of doing variables, loops etc. And that becomes an abomination.
I like YAML.
That's okay, not everyone can be right :)
Speaking of YAML, anybody seen the new PKL config language?
