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YAML has such a comic-book reputation around here that I want to offer a defense of it. Many criticisms of YAML are either about adding non-YAML bits (like turi

YAML has such a comic-book reputation around here that I want to offer a defense of it. Many criticisms of YAML are either about adding non-YAML bits (like turing-complete templates) on top of it, or complaining that it's a bad JSON superset without considering things that can't be expressed in JSON. You know what's really interesting about YAML? !Tags (https://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html#id2805019 https://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html#id2805019), when used as type hints. In YAML, you can write: (forgive the contrived example) !Person name: Joe login: joe In Python, you can use "yaml.add_constructor" to automatically dispatch specific Python code when !Person tags are encountered in the YAML. You can transform text into an object tree (edit: graph, actually -- don't forget about anchors and aliases) automatically. In the right places, this is extremely handy. It's a middle ground between the "duck typing" you normally get with un-validated markup, and the quasi-"static typing" you get with the same inputs after a schema validation. There's an analogy with type annotations in Python. As always, there are right and wrong places to apply this kind of thing.

petestaples 6y ago
Thanks gsmecher. We lean on YAML for writing automated hardware test scripts and have good reasons for it. JSON doesn't allow comments which are needed for a distributed team to understand the meaning of the tests. https://docs.pltcloud.com/TestPlanReference https://docs.pltcloud.com/TestPlanReference
- gsmecher 6y ago
  We use YAML to capture a structured description of a large instrument deployment. Comments are absolutely key for us. The YAML is revision controlled in git and annotating it as a document (rather than as data) is a huge benefit. Tagged YAML allowed us to replace an older system that had ten times as much code. Now, there are far fewer, much warmer code paths, and it's easier to use and far less scary to maintain as a result. Other markups are not the only alternative to this kind of thing. I expect many developers would reach for a database (SQLite?) as a storage medium. However, keeping our data accessible in plain text has been a huge benefit.

petestaples 6y ago

Thanks gsmecher. We lean on YAML for writing automated hardware test scripts and have good reasons for it. JSON doesn't allow comments which are needed for a distributed team to understand the meaning of the tests. https://docs.pltcloud.com/TestPlanReference https://docs.pltcloud.com/TestPlanReference

gsmecher 6y ago
We use YAML to capture a structured description of a large instrument deployment. Comments are absolutely key for us. The YAML is revision controlled in git and annotating it as a document (rather than as data) is a huge benefit. Tagged YAML allowed us to replace an older system that had ten times as much code. Now, there are far fewer, much warmer code paths, and it's easier to use and far less scary to maintain as a result. Other markups are not the only alternative to this kind of thing. I expect many developers would reach for a database (SQLite?) as a storage medium. However, keeping our data accessible in plain text has been a huge benefit.