> 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:

> 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/