4 ms·

This is a use-case for which a DSL is well-suited. They would be wise to abandon YAML.

• purpleidea 6y ago
  I think that I agree of you, and I'm obviously fond of clever DSL's cough mgmt config cough, but it's not clear what specifics you had in mind here. Share away if you're interested!
  • pie_flavor 6y ago
    If it was something that looked like YAML, but wasn't, that'd be fine. YAML in its simplest form is a neat idea. Indentation is simple and obvious. Same as it doesn't matter that TOML looks a heck of a lot like INI. But using YAML itself is terrible, because YAML is a colossally bloated language that does crazy things at the wrong points and has a million syntaxes that step on each others' toes.
  • ddevault 6y ago
    YAML has far too many features and doesn't let you structure data well for this use-case. There's no concise way to provide typings for its fields, for instance - note how every field requires two lines in the examples, far too verbose. I don't really know what to tell you other than that YAML is not well-suited to this domain, and designing a domain-specific language which meets the particular needs of the system, and only just, would be better. You could base it off of C structs or Rust types or s-expressions or whatever else, the exact syntax isn't important so long as it allows you to concisely and precisely specify the semantics of the tool.