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?

  • Windex007@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      As a serialization format, agree 100%, but would Python really be better if it switched to braces?

      • magic_lobster_party@fedia.io
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        2 months ago

        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.

      • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        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

        • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • tyler@programming.dev
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            2 months ago

            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!!

            • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              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.

              • tyler@programming.dev
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                2 months ago

                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.