> There have been many times when in order to really understand a YAML file (full of anchors and aliases, etc) I've had to turn it into JSON. This is ridiculous

> There have been many times when in order to really understand a YAML file (full of anchors and aliases, etc) I've had to turn it into JSON. This is ridiculous. Spitballing here. If underlying data is identical in JSON or YAML or whatever, why not introduce a view layer that is structure agnostic provided that the syntax can be translated without modifying the data? I'm imagining a VSCode plugin or some view that parses the data into whatever format you'd like when you open it, then when you write it serializes it into the file format specified in the filename. You could do the same with your code review system. Ultimately the specific syntax is for humans only, so as tooling improves why not add that next layer of abstraction? Is it because there are so many format-specific idiosyncrasies that can't translate well, due to the complex nature of a lot of these config files (gitlab-yaml, etc.)? Just wondering, without having the time to think through the language specs properly, why we haven't seen this yet when it seems like such a huge quality of life improvement.