26 ms·

XML is overwrought, YAML is a foot-bazooka, JSON lacks comments, TOML gets unwieldy with more than a few levels of nesting, EDN is neat but kind of obscure...

by kortex 3y ago

XML is overwrought, YAML is a foot-bazooka, JSON lacks comments, TOML gets unwieldy with more than a few levels of nesting, EDN is neat but kind of obscure... Maybe we need a new configuration format... ducks Actually I think something in the space of JSON5, Jsonnet, GCL, HCL, CUE, etc, will be the one to win out in the long run. JSON-but-fix-most-of-the-warts. Then there's things which almost sit between fully declarative and turing-complete. Maybe Dhall, if it picks up a few more language implementations. Or CEL. https://github.com/google/cel-spec https://github.com/google/cel-spec

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Yaml and Json are not configuration formats. They are data serialization formats. Xml is a markup language.
hmry 3y ago
+1 for EDN. In terms of new formats, I'm quite fond of RON, it hits a similar sweetspot in flexibility. JSON5 is nice too, mostly because it's popular. IMO Jsonnet, CUE, etc are just in a different category of complexity since they include code and require a full-blown interpreter to read.
crimsonpowder 3y ago
XML's biggest problem is perfectly demonstrated in Apple's plist files. There's no real way to do lists so 15 ways have been invented ad-hoc.
Too 3y ago
Using Terraform/HCL as a pre-processor to generate any of the other formats seems like the best now. It is - No footguns (compared to the alternatives) - Basic text-templating - Can do structural manipulations of data. As opposed to many other config-generators that only do string-interpolation of text. Helm and j2.... kill me please, who ever thought this was a good idea - Basic looping, transformations and function calls. Without falling into the full imperative programming language trap. Configuration is still deterministic and directed. - Supports loading data from other sources - Supports comments

by kortex 3y ago

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Yaml and Json are not configuration formats. They are data serialization formats. Xml is a markup language.

hmry 3y ago

+1 for EDN. In terms of new formats, I'm quite fond of RON, it hits a similar sweetspot in flexibility. JSON5 is nice too, mostly because it's popular. IMO Jsonnet, CUE, etc are just in a different category of complexity since they include code and require a full-blown interpreter to read.

crimsonpowder 3y ago

XML's biggest problem is perfectly demonstrated in Apple's plist files. There's no real way to do lists so 15 ways have been invented ad-hoc.

Too 3y ago

Using Terraform/HCL as a pre-processor to generate any of the other formats seems like the best now. It is - No footguns (compared to the alternatives) - Basic text-templating - Can do structural manipulations of data. As opposed to many other config-generators that only do string-interpolation of text. Helm and j2.... kill me please, who ever thought this was a good idea - Basic looping, transformations and function calls. Without falling into the full imperative programming language trap. Configuration is still deterministic and directed. - Supports loading data from other sources - Supports comments