5 ms·

I don't really know why Yaml got so popular. It has tons of footguns, and it's being misused as custom "programming language" making all the yaml soup unreadabl

I don't really know why Yaml got so popular. It has tons of footguns, and it's being misused as custom "programming language" making all the yaml soup unreadable.

krapp 3y ago
It got popular because it uses significant whitespace, and a whole generation of developers who grew up on Python refused to touch anything that didn't.
- WkndTriathlete 3y ago
  It got popular because it's far easier to read and edit hierarchical and array data in YAML than it is in XML (or JSON). Most of the time I don't need a format with support for some esoteric charset or namespaces or any of the other baggage that comes with XML, I just need a quick way to exchange regular, structured information, possibly with comments, in UTF-8, that is easy to read and write. Show me a better format that doesn't make my eyes bleed from the angle brackets (or the curly braces from JSON) that is commonly supported across lots of programming environments and I'll happily switch to it.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Yaml does not have footguns. It has dumb humans who use it as a configuration format, when it is a data serialization format. Using a car engine as a pizza oven would also result in problems if you tried to cook a pie with it. But having a toxic half cooked pizza doesn't mean the engine has footguns. The engine works fine if you use it to drive to a pizza place to pick up a pizza.
- Cloudef 3y ago
  >when it is a data serialization format. How? It's even worse as a serialization format. Why would you want to serialize into human readable blob anyways? https://github.com/cblp/yaml-sucks https://github.com/cblp/yaml-sucks
  - throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    That person is using it wrong. They are writing the file by hand, violating the spec. Don't write yaml by hand. It is not designed to be used that way.

5 ms·

I don't really know why Yaml got so popular. It has tons of footguns, and it's being misused as custom "programming language" making all the yaml soup unreadabl

by Cloudef 3y ago

I don't really know why Yaml got so popular. It has tons of footguns, and it's being misused as custom "programming language" making all the yaml soup unreadable.

krapp 3y ago
It got popular because it uses significant whitespace, and a whole generation of developers who grew up on Python refused to touch anything that didn't.
- WkndTriathlete 3y ago
  It got popular because it's far easier to read and edit hierarchical and array data in YAML than it is in XML (or JSON). Most of the time I don't need a format with support for some esoteric charset or namespaces or any of the other baggage that comes with XML, I just need a quick way to exchange regular, structured information, possibly with comments, in UTF-8, that is easy to read and write. Show me a better format that doesn't make my eyes bleed from the angle brackets (or the curly braces from JSON) that is commonly supported across lots of programming environments and I'll happily switch to it.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Yaml does not have footguns. It has dumb humans who use it as a configuration format, when it is a data serialization format. Using a car engine as a pizza oven would also result in problems if you tried to cook a pie with it. But having a toxic half cooked pizza doesn't mean the engine has footguns. The engine works fine if you use it to drive to a pizza place to pick up a pizza.
- Cloudef 3y ago
  >when it is a data serialization format. How? It's even worse as a serialization format. Why would you want to serialize into human readable blob anyways? https://github.com/cblp/yaml-sucks https://github.com/cblp/yaml-sucks
  - throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    That person is using it wrong. They are writing the file by hand, violating the spec. Don't write yaml by hand. It is not designed to be used that way.