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YAML seems to be one of the most polarizing things in the software industry. I'm personally a big fan of it, though I agree with the author that it becomes a pa

YAML seems to be one of the most polarizing things in the software industry. I'm personally a big fan of it, though I agree with the author that it becomes a pain once you start trying to use it like a DSL or templating language. I use it in pretty much every project, but I've worked with people who've said they hate it with a burning passion. And it's kind of a trope to see anti-YAML manifestos on HN and /r/programming fairly regularly, both as article submissions and comments. As you mentioned, one of the most useful features for me is the ability to write raw strings with single quotes (or by omitting quotes). I've been in many situations where and I and others have had to maintain regular expressions in config files, and it's so much more of a hassle with JSON due to the escaping requirements. The opening of the article states "Hot take: YAML isn't a configuration language or a configuration language format, it's a serialization format."; I have the exact same opinion, but with "YAML" swapped for "JSON". (And maybe the author would agree with that, too.)

amirkdv 5y ago
> it becomes a pain once you start trying to use it like a DSL or templating language. I like YAML and use it a lot. But I'd argue the fact that it even allows/encourages you to do such things with it is a design flaw that ultimately has kept it from Do One Thing Well.
- meowface 5y ago
  I do think some of the more "advanced" features are definitely a mistake. StrictYAML (https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml) is a limited, much saner subset of YAML that I wish people would use more: https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/features-removed/ https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/features-removed/ No coercion of y/n/yes/no/on/off to booleans (these were also removed in the official YAML 1.2 spec, thankfully), no direct object representations, no anchors or references, etc.
sofixa 5y ago
> I'm personally a big fan of it, though I agree with the author that it becomes a pain once you start trying to use it like a DSL or templating language If only the people behind Ansible agreed with this. Jinja+YAML templating is just utterly terrible.
- meowface 5y ago
  Yeah, I completely get the widespread hatred of YAML due to things like that. It regularly gets abused to extreme lengths. But it also regularly gets used for relatively flat, straightforward, easily maintainable config/data files.

amirkdv 5y ago

> it becomes a pain once you start trying to use it like a DSL or templating language. I like YAML and use it a lot. But I'd argue the fact that it even allows/encourages you to do such things with it is a design flaw that ultimately has kept it from Do One Thing Well.

meowface 5y ago
I do think some of the more "advanced" features are definitely a mistake. StrictYAML (https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml) is a limited, much saner subset of YAML that I wish people would use more: https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/features-removed/ https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/features-removed/ No coercion of y/n/yes/no/on/off to booleans (these were also removed in the official YAML 1.2 spec, thankfully), no direct object representations, no anchors or references, etc.

sofixa 5y ago

> I'm personally a big fan of it, though I agree with the author that it becomes a pain once you start trying to use it like a DSL or templating language If only the people behind Ansible agreed with this. Jinja+YAML templating is just utterly terrible.

meowface 5y ago
Yeah, I completely get the widespread hatred of YAML due to things like that. It regularly gets abused to extreme lengths. But it also regularly gets used for relatively flat, straightforward, easily maintainable config/data files.