I feel that Yaml sucks. I understand the need for such markup language but I think it sucks. Somehow it’s clunky to use. Can you explain why?
I used to think json was the best until I found json lines or line delimited json. Thank me later. I use it all the time. You can append until you’re blue in the face. It’s great for log files. Each line is a valid json file.
Any language in which whitespace has syntactic value is intrinsically flawed.
Can’t speak to your specific issues, but that’s why yaml will always suck.
Haskell supports both semantic whitespace and explicit delimiters, and somehow almost everybody that uses the language disagrees with you.
But anyway, for all the problems of YAML, this one isn’t even relevant enough to point out. Even if you agree it’s a problem. (And I agree that the YAML semantic whitespace is horrible.) If YAML was a much better language, it would be worth arguing whether semantic whitespace breaks it or not.
Yeah but Haskell is mostly used by mathematicians…
Not any language. I code professionally in F# which has semantic whitespace and it has literally never been an issue for me or my team. In contrast to Python, it’s a compiled language and the compiler is quite strict, so that probably helps.
As a serialization format, agree 100%, but would Python really be better if it switched to braces?
Yes, I think so. The downside with Python comes when refactoring the code. There’s always this double checking if the code is correctly indented after the refactor. Sometimes small mistakes creep in.
It’s really hard to tell when Python code is incorrectly indented. It’s often still valid Python code, but you can’t tell if it’s wrong unless you know the intention of the code.
In order languages it’s always obvious when code is incorrectly indented. There’s no ambiguity.
Yes it would - look at optional braces for short if expressions in C family languages and why it’s so discouraged in large projects. Terminating characters are absolutely worth the cost of an extra LoC
False dichotomy. Optional braces are bad practice because they mislead the programmer that is adding an additional clause to the block.
This misleading behavior wouldn’t happen in Python, as it would either be invalid syntax, or it would be part of the block.
Indentation problems are pretty obvious to the reader. Even more than missing or unbalanced braces.
That misleading behavior does happen in Python. The next programmer that comes along can’t tell if the original programmer fucked it up and didn’t unindent to put a statement outside of the block or if they meant to put it inside the block. I’ve debugged this one too many times and it takes hours each time because it’s impossible to see the bug at all!!
The misleading behavior is about what you expect to execute in the source code you’re looking at vs what’s actually executed.
What you describe is a logic ambiguity that can happen in any program / language.
I don’t agree. It’s a direct result of whitespace, which does not happen if you don’t use whitespace. For example it can happen in Java and kotlin, but only if you use if statements without braces, which you pretty much never see. If you do see it you know to look out for the exact issue I described. That’s not possible in Python, since there is no alternative.
YAML works great for small config files, or situations where your configuration is fully declarative. Go look at the Kubernetes API with its resources.
People think YAML sucks because everyone loves creating spaghetti config/templates with it.
One reason it tends to become an absolute unholy mess is because people work around the declarative nature of those APIs by shoving imperative code into it. Think complicated Helm charts with little snippets of logic and code all over the place. It just isn’t really made for doing that.
It also forces your brain to switch back and forth between the two different paradigms. It doesn’t just become hard to read, it becomes hard to reason about.
Can people stop hating on shit?
FOR FUCKS SAKE, negative reinforcement dopamine has RUINED THE FUCKING NET.
EVERYWHERE I GO there’s someone bitching about something, hate circlejerks are unbelievably popular, people just love to hate on stuff.
You’re ruining your thought patterns with all these social media negativity bullshit.
Fucking TOML users hate on fucking YAML fucking C++ users hate Rust fucking Rust users hate literally everything under the sun and are insufferable to work with
EVERYONE, fucking CHILL
Can you stop hating on haters? Thanks 😄
stop hating on rust devs
Because people over use it. YAML is pretty good for short config files that need to be human readable but it falls apart with complex multi line strings and escaping.
I think there are much better clearly delimited for machine reading purposes formats out there that you should prefer if you’re writing a really heavy config file and, tbh, I think for everything else
.iniis probably “good enough”.At least use TOML if you like ini, there is no ini spec but TOML can look quite similar.
YAML is fine if you use a subset (don’t use the advanced features - not like you know those anyway) and use explicit strings (always add
"to strings), otherwise things may be cast when you did not intend values to be cast.Example:
country: NO(Norway) will be cast tocountry: False, because it’ll castno(regardless from casing) tofalse, andyestotrue.country: "NO"should not be cast.People are working on making S-Expressions a standard: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-rivest-sexp/
Note: This is just a draft, but improvements have been happening since 2023.
I probably won’t like the parentheses, but I think I’ll take it over yaml/json/whateverelse.
That appears to not support comments. How they made that mistake after JSON is a mystery.
