Why YAML sucks?
from heikkiket@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev on 06 Sep 2024 21:00
https://programming.dev/post/19074447
from heikkiket@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev on 06 Sep 2024 21:00
https://programming.dev/post/19074447
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?
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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.
It’s the only time that tabs Vs spaces really riles me up. So annoying when everyone has different tab lengths
As a serialization format, agree 100%, but would Python really be better if it switched to braces?
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
I’m fine with python, because it’s consistent. In C I get nervous every time I see it.
goto fail;
I started in C before moving on to C++, Java, Ruby and Python.
I’ve had more bugs from missing braces than from misaligned whitespace because the latter is far more obvious when looking at a block of code.
Compilation error or run time errors? One is a gift and the other is a curse.
PHP likes to have a word with you. (:
Like what?
Gonna whisper what the first word in “PHP” stands for
PHP?
Yeah like the programming language
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.
They may be obvious to the reader but they may be impossible to see if tabs and spaces are mixed together.
Closing tokens are always clearer.
yes, from my other comment
but that’s easily fixed with an editor setting - on the other hand, unbalancing braces (and not realizing it) is too easy all the time.
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.
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.
It’s only hard to tell indentation in Python when the code block gets longer than about a screen, which is usually a sign the code should be refactored into smaller methods.
As someone who has been working in Python a ton for the last couple years, it’s amusing to me how many downvotes you’re getting for simply noting that good code style and tight, terse, modularized implementation of business logic more or less addresses the issue. Because it absolutely does in the vast majority of cases.
They hated him because he spoke the truth
People hate hearing that they are bad coders 😂
You and the other guy are saying to focus on writing code with less indentation and using smaller methods, and you both got downvoted.
I fully agree, small methods all the way, and when that’s not possible it’s time to refactor into possibility!
Or a sign you should get a bigger screen 😂 (j/k)
Can address it by writing code that doesn’t depend much on indentation, which also makes code more linear and easier to follow.
Yes, totally agree, and it applies to formats and language syntaxes even if braces are used.
I think this is just familiarity. I never have issues with indentation, but when refactoring js I’m always like hey who’s fucking brace is this
To be pendantic, it’s level of indentation in Python that has semantic meaning, not whitespace.
The end of line also has semantic meaning. Both indentation and eol are whitespace.
Indentation can be (and should be) tabs, EOL is it’s its own thing either \n or CRLF which Python source code did actually care about as recently as 2.3.
Assumptions like this is why most people should stick to verbose languages with lots of guardrail braces.
Yes. A thousand times, yes.
If nothing else it enforces readable code which I think is a good thing.
I now use Scala 3, and very happy with syntactic whitespace (combined with an intelligent compiler)
YAML sucks because, among other things, indenting it is not obvious.
In contrast, the only mistake of Python when it comes to whitespaces was allowing hard tabs, which makes it too easy to mix them if your editor is not configured.
Improper indentation stands out more than missing or unbalanced braces and it’s really not an issue to delimit code blocks.
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In any modern editor it is configurable with spaces too
What “it” is configurable? If the code is indented with 4 spaces, it is indented with 4 spaces. You can configure your editor to indent with 1 space if you want, but then your code is not going to respect the 4 spaces of indentation used by the rest of the code.
I repeat, the only accessible indentation option is using tabs. This is not an opinion because every other option forces extra painful steps for those with vision issues (including, but not limited to, having to reformat the source files to tabs so they can work on them and then reformat them back to using spaces in order to commit them)
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.
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”.I agree - YAML is not suitable for complex cases that people use it in, like
Terraformand Home Assistant. My pet peeve is a YAML config in a situation that really calls for more abstraction, like functions and variables. I’d like to see more use of the class of configuration languages that support that stuff, like Dhall, Cue, and Nickel.There is another gotcha which is that YAML has more room for ambiguity than, say, JSON. YAML has a lot of ways to say
trueandfalse, and it’s implicit quoting is a bit complex. So some values that you expect to be strings might be interpreted as something els.For those highly complex situations is Lua still viewed as the ideal solution? Lua is sort of legendary for game configuration and seems to strike a good expressiveness/accessibility balance for modders and the casually technical.
I think it depends. Lua is great for scripting - like when X happens do Y. I agree that makes sense for a case like Home Assistant. Sometimes you really want the result to be a data structure, not an interactive program, in which case I think more sophisticated configuration (as opposed to scripting) languages might be better.
What YAML does Terraform use? HCL is similar but different enough to YAML.
Oh, thanks for calling that out. I think I may have mixed up some of the frustrations I experienced at an old job.
Maybe you’re thinking of Ansible?
Yes, there’s a good example. Ansible would make more sense if its configuration language was Nix…
But if one is already using nix, then just use nix
At least use TOML if you like ini, there is no ini spec but TOML can look quite similar.
Strong agree. It’s also the absolute best at expressing really long documents of configuration/data.
Yes, they could’ve just used JSON. Totally pointless waste of time.
So Poe’s Law and all that… I really hope you’re being sarcastic because having non-technical people hand edit JSON is a nightmare. It’s also quite annoying to read without a lot of extra whitespace which most editors that’d help less technical folks omit… and comments to help highlight what different things mean are hacky, hard to read, and actually read as data.
No, I’m kind of serious, the comment situation is already solved in JSON… about the rest yeah, Yaml might be easier but the different isn’t that much. Non tech people can’t edit Yaml properly either so.
JSON does lack comments. And numbers that are not 64 floats.
TFB, the numbers are not defined as 64 bits floats.
They are just not defined. At all.
Exactly that’s a job for the parser / consumer.
That’s a valid point.
There are two kinds of good serialization languages, the ones where values are black boxes and only serialize the data structure, and the ones where everything is completely determined and can be turned directly into an API.
JSON is neither, but it’s closer to the first than YAML. XML is the first, while the SOAP standard almost turns it into the second. TOML is about as close to the first as JSON.
Readability in general sucks
There’s a spec for json with comments. It’s better than yaml in every way.
And lack of trailing comma’s
There’s a lot of JSON parsers that don’t mind to see comments there, just ignore them. And there’s also the “_comment” / “$comment” thing.
I don’t hate YAML, but it has the same issues languages like PHP and JS introduce…there are unexpected corner cases that only exist because the designer wanted the language to be “friendly”
www.bram.us/2022/01/11/yaml-the-norway-problem/
Sorry, what’s confusing the fact that
“Hi my name is {$this->name}”works and“Hi my name is {self::name}”is unintelligible gibberish! /sI don’t like it either, but I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe the biggest flaw to me is it uses Python style indentation for structuring as part of data logic. It doesn’t feel like a configuration language to me and it does not feel simple too. It’s also unlike most programming language structures (maybe besides Python), so it looks weird to read and write. Other than that, I don’t know exactly why I don’t like this format much. Admittedly, I did not do much in YAML, so because lack of experience take my opinion with a thick grain of salt.
We have JSON and TOML. I quiet like TOML. We have “better” alternatives, that are probably easier to parse. And therefore there is not much need for YAML. Maybe if YAML was the default config format for Python it would get off the ground and be accepted more often.
It sucks the same way Python sucks. Some people just really don’t like indentation-based syntax. I’m one of them, so I dislike both formats. However, if you groove on that sort of thing, I don’t think YAML is any worse than any other markup.
Oddly, I get along with Haskell, which also used indentation for scoping/delimiting; I can’t explain that, except that, somehow, indentation-based syntax seems to fit better with functional languages. But I have no clear argument about why; it’s just an oddity in my aesthetics.
You can’t say python’s whitespace usage is as bad as yaml’s. YAML mixes 2 and 4 spaces all the time. Python scripts don’t run if you write this kind of crap.
And whitespaces is really just the tip of the iceberg of YAML problems…
I think that’s a user thing and it doesn’t happen if you have a linter enforce 2 or 4.
That’s part of the problem. Different number of whitespaces indicate different nesting levels and the YAML spec does not enforce them. These two horrible YAMLs are valid and are not equivalent:
a: b: - c - d - e f: "ghi"a: b: - c - d - e f: "ghi"So it’s easy to enforce locally but you don’t have to. And it’s easy to see indentation on modern IDEs and you can even make your indents rainbows and collapse structures to make it easier to see what’s going on, but I guess since some people want to write it in vi without ALE or a barebones text editor, it’s bad? Like there are legit reasons it’s bad, and other people have mentioned them throughout the thread, but this seems like a pretty easy thing to deal with. I work with ansible a bunch and YAML rarely is where my problem is.
Jesus, just what I want to do with the devops team - spend a few weeks standardizing on an editor and configuring them to edit yaml.
A few weeks? How do you stay employed? How do you even feed yourself at that pace? Blocked on making a sandwich, I’ve got the wrong type of bread.
It’s three lines in an editor config file to standardize the indents across any editor: editorconfig.org
In vscode, adding two extensions is all I need:, yamllint (if you don’t use linters, I don’t know how you do your job in any language) and rainbow indents. Atom had similar ones. I’m sure all IDEs are capable of these things. If you work at a place that forces you to use a specific editor and limits the way you can use it, that’s not YAML’s fault.
At a certain point, it’s your deficiencies that make a language difficult, not the language’s. Don’t blame your hammer when you haven’t heated the iron.
You know how many editor plugins I need to work with json? None.
You want an award? I hate working with JSON without a prettier.
Sure it does. You only need to be consistent within a block. Python’s syntax is ridiculous and solves problems that basically don’t exist.
All of my java/kotlin/rust/etc. code is trivially well formatted and can be done by my editor. Moving code blocks is trivial. Refactoring is easier when I didn’t need to hand -format the code just to make it work.
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“Why does YAML suck?” is a question. “Why YAML sucks” is an explanation.
I think TOML should replace YAML for config files, it is much clearer, easier to parse for a human.
Depends on the data structure. If you want to save a table of sorts, you’re getting a bunch of unreadable [[[]]] nonsense.
For flat structures it’s great though.
I like yml. Clean to read, easy to use, supports comments.
Way easier to type than json!
and no possibility of (a lack of) trailing comma’s. Unless you use JSON inside Yaml, you heathens!
One pattern I’ve noticed is people seeking a language that’s better than {JSON,XML,INI,etc} at wrangling their slightly complex configuration files, noticing the additional features and type support offered by YAML, and assuming it will be a good solution.
Then, as their configs grow ever larger and more complex, they discover that expressing them in YAML requires large sections of deep nesting, long item sequences, and line wrapping. The syntax style that they saw working well in other places (e.g. certain programming languages) breaks down quickly at that level of complexity, making it difficult for humans to correctly write and follow, and leading to frequent errors.
YAML doesn’t suck for small stuff, IMHO. (But it is more complex than necessary for small stuff.)
For things likely to grow to medium-large size or complexity, I would recommend either breaking up the data into separate files, or looking for a different config/serialization language.
I don’t like YAML because it’s overly complicated. The specification is like 80 pages long. How the hell did they think that was a good idea?
JSON on the other hand is super simple. It doesn’t do more than it needs to.
Just compare this: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/
With this: https://www.json.org/json-en.html
The entire JSON specification is shorter than just the table of contents of the YAML specification!
Another thing I like about JSON is that you can format it however you want with the whitespace. Want everything on one line? Just write everything on one line!
If data can be represented as a JSON, then there’s generally only one way to represent it in JSON (apart from whitespace). In YAML the same data can be represented in 1000s of different ways. You pick one.
This is the major reason for me. I really liked yaml, because it is way more readable to me than JSON. But then I kept finding new and more confusing yaml features and have realized how over-engineered it is.
Yaml would be great language if it had its features prunned heavy.
I will never forgive JSON for not allowing commas after the last element in a list.
That lack of trailing comma has been the bane of my existence.
But… Yaml ain’t markup language…
I wish s-expression was a popular alternative. It’s readable without the yaml issues.
Someone’s working on a standard! datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-rivest-sexp/
noyaml.com
That is amazing.
I don’t know what I just read.
If my website ever gets married, I’m going to invite this website to stand next to it as a bridesmaid - because it makes my website look pretty by comparison.
Sadly, unreadable on mobile. Text doesn’t word wrap, dragging to pan it is annoying and makes the keyboard show up.
Most of the stuff here can be avoided by using quotes for strings…
I think much of the issue with YAML is that it’s often paired with bad editors. You need a way to manage the whitespace, collapse sections, etc. Notepad doesn’t cut it.
If YAML and JSON were gripping my hands for dear life, dangling off of a cliff…
I would let both drop into the abyss so I could spend more time with INI.
it does what it needs to do: i don’t think it’s necessarily bad.
it’s for data not programming and it handles complex structures cleaner than json
My issue with it arises when data is not interpreted as I expected, like because of weird white space issues for example.
cradles yaml in her hands and coos don’t you talk to my baby like that! she has potential !
Programmers hate everything. You could design a spec which serenades you with angel song and feeds you chocolate dipped grapes and someone would be like: This is awful, my usecase is being a dog.
This comment is underrated, even if it rises to the top of all comments.
Pleased to have touched your life with levity, stranger.
Sure there aren’t many things that are universally loved. I mean I can’t really think of anything that doesn’t have some flaw.
But that doesn’t mean everything is equal! What would you rather program with, Visual Basic or Go? PHP or Typescript? If you polled people there are obvious winners.
Hey would you rather build from wood or steel?
What glue is better: 2 part epoxy or PVA?
Do you prefer soap or bleach as cleaning agent?
Would you rather build from wood or tissue paper?
What glue is better: 2 part epoxy or pritt stick?
Do you prefer soap or ash as a cleaning agent?
Unlike tissue paper yaml is actually fit for purpose. I actually don’t know of any lang that literally can’t run a program. The most you could stretch what you’re saying to is that some esolangs are akin to making bricks of packed tissues to build with. They are art projects not serious submissions though.
I don’t like js as much as anyone else but as evidenced by reality it works. Programmers need to stop sniffing their own farts, you have such strong opinions about the most insane shit when at most you should be talking about narrower scopes for use and trade offs.
Different user here.
My only criteria for a backend language is it tells me something went wrong and where. Hence my distaste for JS.
I write my specs in C++
I didn’t use yaml much while it was gaining popularity, and therefore didn’t pay much attention. But this article really made me pay attention and now I distrust anything that uses yaml in any capacity.
ruudvanasseldonk.com/…/the-yaml-document-from-hel…
Great link.
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 😄
Yeah TBH I like yaml. Sure its not the best ever, but its not the worst it could possibly be.
For config its not terrible. For ansible playbooks its again… not terrible.
Why is everyone always hating on something which is just kinda mid.
Config is fine, but Yamls biggest problem is people use it to describe programs. For example: playbooks. For example: CI steps.
If YAML wasn’t abused in this way it would have a lot less hate.
What’s wrong with using YAML for CI? I mean, I use it for Gitlab CI, the underlying script it runs is just Bash.
Right, so you just have a single step and then hand over to a proper script. I’ve seen many people try to put much more complex logic in there before handing over to a proper language.
You’re doing it right by avoiding as much of Gitlab’s CI features. I’ve seen versions where scripts are inlined in the YAML with expressions in random rule fields and pipeline variables thrown all over the place. And don’t get me started on their “includes” keyword, it’s awful in practice, gives me nightmares.
Then I write a Kubernetes manifest in YAML with JSON schema validation and the heart rate goes down again.
I dream of a life where I use YAML but all my configs are stuck in XML. People can complain but there’s always worse options.
One nice thing about XML is that there’s an official way to link to the schema from within the document. If you do that you can easily automatically validate it, and even better you get fantastic IDE support via Red Hat’s LSP server. Live validation, hover for keys, etc.
It’s a really nice experience and JSON schema can’t really match it.
That said, XML just has the wrong data model for 99% of use cases.
stop hating on rust devs
No seeds no stems no stress my guy. The Internet is a great place for complaining. Readers can downvote and move on, everyone gets what they want.
Tons of people making Python comparisons regarding indentation here. I disagree. If you make an indentation error in Python, you will usually notice it right away. On the one hand because the logic is off or you’re referencing stuff that’s not in scope, on the other because if you are a sane person, you use a formatter and a linter when writing code.
The places you can make these error are also very limited. At most at the very beginning and very end of a block. I can remember a single indentation error I only caught during debugging and that’s it. 99% of the time your linter will catch them.
YAML is much worse in that regard, because you are not programming, you are structuring data. There is a high chance nothing will immediately go wrong. Items have default values, high-level languages might hide mistakes, badly trained programmers might be quick to cast stuff and don’t question it, and most of the time tools can’t help you either, because they cannot know you meant to create a different structure.
That said, while I much prefer TOML for being significantly simpler, I can’t say YAML doesn’t get the job done. It’s also very readable as long as you don’t go crazy with nesting. What’s annoying about it is the amount of very subtle mistakes it allows you to make. I get super anxious when writing YAML.
It’s inconsistent and annoying. Expressive, yes. Gets it’s job done, yes. Absolute nightmare of a spec, YES.
The fact that JSON is a subset of YAML should tell you everything about how bloated the spec is. And of course there’s the “no” funny things.
Personally, my favourite way to write configs was using lua (because it was already part of the project so why not), but JSON does fine.
To paraphrase: There are two kinds of markup languages. Those that people complain about and those that nobody uses.
There is no silver bullet that will work perfectly for all use cases and we also don’t want to use 100 different tools. So people use things that aren’t perfect. But they’re good enough. I don’t think YAML is perfect and I still use it, because people know it and there are tons of tools already available.
But it’s not a markup language… It’s for data serialisation…
I remember the time when YAML meant Yet Another Markup Language.
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: 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.
That's a thorny question: Do comments need to be in the base standard, or can that be offloaded to those building on it? It doesn't look like it would be hard to have
(comment "foo bar baz")in an expression and have a re-parser throw that out.Is the complaint that no two groups of people will use the same comment standard if left to their own devices? It's not like the other data from different sources will always match up. What's one extra, and fairly easy to handle SNAFU?
That said, yes, I think I'd be more comfortable knowing there was an accepted comment format. The aesthetic seems to be Lisp-like, and I notice that the Lisp comment marker, the semicolon, is currently a reserved character, that is, it's illegal to use it unquoted. Maybe they're thinking of adding that at some point.
That is pretty much what the official “solution” is for comments in
package.json- add“//”: “foo bar baz”keys to dictionaries and NPM will ignore them.In practice it’s terrible. You need real comments.
I hated yaml with every fiber of my being when first had to use it, but I really wanted to use HomeAssistant and see what I could do with it. I hated it a bit less when I started using docker compose. I started loving it when I started using it as a way to explain json to non-programming IT types, trying to explain it without braces and brackets seems to get across easier. I guess its more human readable, but as a result formatting has to be spot on (those indents and spaces replace the need for brackets and braces).
One useful trick if you truly hate it but need it, write it in json, then just use a converter to change that into yaml.
Fun fact, since YAML is a superset of JSON, any JSON is a valid YAML. You can still use pure JSON.
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.
Yaml is fundamentally the same as the json and xml it has mostly replaced (and the toml that didn’t manage to replace yaml)… it’s a data serialization format and just doesn’t have any facility for making abstractions, which are the main tool we human use to deal with complexity.
JSON and YAML aren’t the same as XML. The attribute/child distinction in XML, and the fact that every object has a tag name associated with it, make it a PITA to map into the data primitives of any programming language I know.
Yes, XML is different than JSON and YAML, but it’s not particularly easier or harder to manually read/edit than JSON or YAML are (IMO the are all a pain, each in its own way).
If you want to look at it from the programmer’s side (which is not what OP was talking about)… marshalling/unmarshalling has been a solved issue for at least 20yrs now :) just have a library do it for you (do map json/yaml properties to you objects manually?).
You don’t need to worry about attributes/child elements:
<person name=“jack” />and<person><name>jack</name></person>will work the same (ok, this may depend on what language/library you pick - the lib I used back in the day worked either way).If anything, the issue with XML is all the unnecessarily complicated stuff they added to its “core” (eg. CDATA, namespaces, non-standalone documents, …) and all the unnecessarily complicated technologies/standards they developed around XML (from Xinclude to SOAP and many others)… but just ignore that BS (like the rest of the world does) and you’ll mostly be fine :)
Abstractions aren’t concrete and all of these standards you’re referring to are concrete data serialisations. You may be interested in CUE which captures this concept in its design.
It’s a rube goldberg footgun
I like TOML: TOML.io
YAML had comments and trailing commas, therefore it’s objectively better than JSON. If you want a compromise solution that mostly looks like JSON, try JSON5.
Following along with the style of your own post: YAML doesn’t suck, because I feel so.
Thanks for asking.
I don’t like a thing, fellas. With that being all I’ve told you, please explain why I don’t like that thing.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/bdcb27f0-c138-474b-95cf-1445d63ea576.gif">
White space/indentation as a construct of the syntax.
It’s why I have a hard time with python.
People have their likes and dislikes. Nothing wrong with that.
We all know it sucks. I have no idea why people use it instead of anything else. My workday is jammed with fucking ansible which, while also being so ghetto that we were easily doing more with less in 2002, uses So.much.fucking.yaml . Just when you think ansible couldn’t get more clunky and useless and slow, it also is configured in yaml.
huh?
I find developing GitHub CI in YAML clunky.
I don’t find configuring a simple service via YAML config, with a preset showing me and explaining what I can do clunky.
It’s docs are garbage, but the language is quite simple and human readable even for non-techies. I think it’s a bit too easy at times, resulting in people just kinda winging it
.
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.