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I'd prefer XML because of the stability of the tools available for it. Recently I was writing a custom static site generator for my website. I started with pyt

I'd prefer XML because of the stability of the tools available for it. Recently I was writing a custom static site generator for my website. I started with python and yaml using the pyyaml lib. After two months (don't laugh, I wasn't writing this generator all this time; i had a break) I tested if everything I wrote previously was warking. Pyyaml came at me screaming that they deprecated something and I shouldn't use it, otherwise the feds will get me. Let's go several months earlier still. I was learning Python, using Debian Stretch which has Python 3.5 installed. The book I was learning from used Python 3.7. When I got to a point it became clear that 3.5 lacks a few things which are needed to continue learning Python according to the book. So I compiled Python 3.7, set up virtualenv with it and... The code I had previously written stopped working. With a version bump from 3.5 -> 3.7? That's a minor version change. And now 3.5 was expecting at one point to have a string path passed as an argument, and 3.7 was expecting a pathlib path. That was trivial to fix in case of a small example, but I would dread using such a thing for anything big and then having to debug what exactly broke between different (minor!) versions of Python or its libraries. These new hip tools seem to have a backwards-compatibility issue. I eventually settled on using XSLT and a couple really short shell scripts (which all fit on my screen at the same time) and I don't expect them to break in the next two decades. However, XML is still a pain and I would prefer just using S-expressions and Lisp[1]. It's just that for now my only experience with them is writing things for Emacs and I would like to learn Scheme/CommonLisp to do anything outside of Emacs with Lisp. [1] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem

pietroglyph 7y ago
This sounds more like a Python and pyyaml problem than a YAML or JSON problem. Someone could come along and totally refactor XSLT even if XML stayed the same, and then you would be in the same boat.
- ColanR 7y ago
  Parent addressed your comment in his first sentence. > I'd prefer XML because of the stability of the tools available for it.
crehn 7y ago
What are the de facto tools for formatting and querying XML files through a CLI? They should be ridiculously simple to install and use.
- SamWhited 7y ago
  If you have libxml2-utils installed (package name may vary depending on your distro, but it almost certainly has a package) you can probably do something like "xmllint --format". You can also use "xmllint --shell file.xml" to get an interactive shell, or execute an xpath query and return, eg. "xmllint --xpath //foo file.xml". Use "-" for the file to read from stdin, as you might expect.
- 0x0 7y ago
  xmlstarlet is a useful CLI XML manipulation tool
viraptor 7y ago
> With a version bump from 3.5 -> 3.7? That's a minor version change. Python doesn't do semantic versioning. (Just like most language runtimes) You can find deprecations and backwards incompatible changes in the release notes. Although those breaking changes are not frequent and if https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.6.html#whatsnew36-pep519 https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.6.html#whatsnew36-pep... resulted in broken code, you likely ran into something that's reportable as a bug.

pietroglyph 7y ago

This sounds more like a Python and pyyaml problem than a YAML or JSON problem. Someone could come along and totally refactor XSLT even if XML stayed the same, and then you would be in the same boat.

ColanR 7y ago
Parent addressed your comment in his first sentence. > I'd prefer XML because of the stability of the tools available for it.

crehn 7y ago

What are the de facto tools for formatting and querying XML files through a CLI? They should be ridiculously simple to install and use.

SamWhited 7y ago
If you have libxml2-utils installed (package name may vary depending on your distro, but it almost certainly has a package) you can probably do something like "xmllint --format". You can also use "xmllint --shell file.xml" to get an interactive shell, or execute an xpath query and return, eg. "xmllint --xpath //foo file.xml". Use "-" for the file to read from stdin, as you might expect.
0x0 7y ago
xmlstarlet is a useful CLI XML manipulation tool

viraptor 7y ago

> With a version bump from 3.5 -> 3.7? That's a minor version change. Python doesn't do semantic versioning. (Just like most language runtimes) You can find deprecations and backwards incompatible changes in the release notes. Although those breaking changes are not frequent and if https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.6.html#whatsnew36-pep519 https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.6.html#whatsnew36-pep... resulted in broken code, you likely ran into something that's reportable as a bug.