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> If it was that bad, nobody would use it. > IMO if there was something that was substantially better, we would see projects switching to it in a heartbeat. T

> If it was that bad, nobody would use it. > IMO if there was something that was substantially better, we would see projects switching to it in a heartbeat. This weird line seems to govern a very persistent & substantial minority of thinking in tech that I've never been able to grok. It's like a sort of "natural selection" of quality - not only have I never seen it apply in real life, there's a reasonable argument that the opposite applies (a topic on which there's been plenty written). I guess it's based on some imagined model of each individual being an intentional & fully informed (& objectively correct) decision-maker in their own tech usage; it's certainly not based in experience. I use YAML in work. A lot. It may be the filetype I interact with most. Does that make me an advocate? I use it because the tools I interact with default to it - I have not actively selected each of these tools; of the subset I have chosen myself, YAML was one of the cons in that selection process. JSON is imperfect. XML is imperfect. TOML is imperfect. YAML is not imperfect - that implies something approaching quality.

Draiken 3y ago
I don't think using it makes you an advocate. I totally understand the point that most of the time we're not choosing it. It has been chosen for us in one way or another and that sucks. My whole point is that we should focus on the projects using YAML instead of the format itself. Complaining about YAML at this point is like kicking a dead horse. We know it's not ideal, but saying it's crap is not gonna change anything.
- lucideer 3y ago
  > saying it's crap is not gonna change anything. That's true, & at the end of the day, people use YAML for a reason - one that other alternatives fall down on: it's the same reason people use Markdown (& despite it having similar drawbacks to YAML it's become even more ubiquitous). Ultimately, YAML & Markdown are good for one common reason: human write-ability. A lot of people think it's about readability, but it isn't: readability may be a pro in terms of quality, but its write-ability that actually drives adoption. YAML has pretty bad readability in reality (people think it's good because they confuse readability with aesthetics), in no small part due to its non-standardised indentation (also in smaller part due to its ambiguous data-types). JSON is probably the most readable of all of them (readability isn't about being terse or "clean"), but the requirement for terminators makes it much less write-able. XML is worse again in this regard. TOML is a kind of middle-ground - adopting many of YAML's flaws but fixing some of it's most egregious faults. Personally though, I think it seems like an odd attempt to resurrect INI, & I'd prefer something like StrictYAML[0]. [0] https://pypi.org/project/strictyaml/ https://pypi.org/project/strictyaml/
gpderetta 3y ago
The Efficient Markets hypothesis applied to software engineering :). Maybe with zero friction, infinite developer resources and perfect knowledge it would be true.

Draiken 3y ago

I don't think using it makes you an advocate. I totally understand the point that most of the time we're not choosing it. It has been chosen for us in one way or another and that sucks. My whole point is that we should focus on the projects using YAML instead of the format itself. Complaining about YAML at this point is like kicking a dead horse. We know it's not ideal, but saying it's crap is not gonna change anything.

lucideer 3y ago
> saying it's crap is not gonna change anything. That's true, & at the end of the day, people use YAML for a reason - one that other alternatives fall down on: it's the same reason people use Markdown (& despite it having similar drawbacks to YAML it's become even more ubiquitous). Ultimately, YAML & Markdown are good for one common reason: human write-ability. A lot of people think it's about readability, but it isn't: readability may be a pro in terms of quality, but its write-ability that actually drives adoption. YAML has pretty bad readability in reality (people think it's good because they confuse readability with aesthetics), in no small part due to its non-standardised indentation (also in smaller part due to its ambiguous data-types). JSON is probably the most readable of all of them (readability isn't about being terse or "clean"), but the requirement for terminators makes it much less write-able. XML is worse again in this regard. TOML is a kind of middle-ground - adopting many of YAML's flaws but fixing some of it's most egregious faults. Personally though, I think it seems like an odd attempt to resurrect INI, & I'd prefer something like StrictYAML[0]. [0] https://pypi.org/project/strictyaml/ https://pypi.org/project/strictyaml/

gpderetta 3y ago

The Efficient Markets hypothesis applied to software engineering :). Maybe with zero friction, infinite developer resources and perfect knowledge it would be true.