3 ms·
I'm personally sick of yet-another-config-formats. Why did designing metaformats become cool? They all have warts because using the same symbolic notation for
by _jal 6y ago
I'm personally sick of yet-another-config-formats. Why did designing metaformats become cool?
They all have warts because using the same symbolic notation for data and structure leads to encoding issues that have cognitive overhead.
So instead of getting used to the pratfalls involved in making mistakes in one format/library set, we can do it in a whole bunch of different ones. And of course if anyone uses the new format much much, we'll get multiple, slightly incompatible versions, all with different bugs.
Thanks?
- JadeNB 6y ago> I'm personally sick of yet-another-config-formats. Why did designing metaformats become cool? I can't seem to find a date for it, but I think TOML is pretty old, so probably predates a lot of these YACFs. I think that the problem is that it's such an easy workflow: 1. No existing config format is perfect. Look at this should-be easy thing I want to do that isn't easy! 2. Create a new format that makes the desired should-be easy thing actually easy. If you have one or two pain points, then it's really easy to address them, and your life gets so much better for a little while. If you're lucky and you're a good YACF designer, then your life gets so much better for quite a while—and, by the time you realise why the design isn't perfect, you're already invested in it.
- shakna 6y ago> I can't seem to find a date for it, but I think TOML is pretty old, so probably predates a lot of these YACFs. Not _that_ old. TOML's first release was in 2013. But as a testament to the config format, it was only about a year old when Rust's cargo adopted it fully.
- thayne 6y ago3. Realize that making a good general purpose config language that works well for a variety of different use cases is actually quite difficult.