It's fashionable to hate YAML. And sometimes rightly so. But what are the alternatives? JSON, XML, INI, TOML, Dahl, Cue, JSONNET, HCL, your programming language

It's fashionable to hate YAML. And sometimes rightly so. But what are the alternatives? JSON, XML, INI, TOML, Dahl, Cue, JSONNET, HCL, your programming language of choice. Also let's agree on the target use case - in that YAML is largely used for configuration and operational tasks. If I were to rank-order the features necessary in a good configuration language they would be 1) readability 2) data/schema validation 3) stackability/composability 4) language support 5) editor support 6) industry adoption. So let's do a comparison: YAML is fairly easy to read, has schema validation with the right library, and is pretty ubiquitous. It can get unwieldy like JSON though. XML is big, ugly, unreadable. No one likes XML despite it's robust schema validation capabilities. Your programming language of choice doesn't work because of the target use case unless you truly are a build-run group. INI it too simplistic for many environments. HCL is included because I'm a bit of a Terraform fanboy and it has great features like validation, readability and composability. However you're not going to find it in the wild as a general purpose configuration language - outside of Terraform it just hasn't taken hold. Does anyone really use Dahll? (Serious question.) JSON is nice because everyone understands JSON. JSON is not nice because all the brackets, braces, quotes, etc get in the way and make sufficiently large configurations hard to read. With the right library you can get schema validation. JSONNET suffers from the same problems that JSON does, but adds more operations which makes sufficiently large things very hard to read. TOML is nice and reminds me of INI in it's simplicity. Cue looks and smells like JSON, has schema validation, but is much more readable. If I were to rank-order these options it would be 1) Cue 2) TOML 3) YAML 4) JSON 5) your programming language of choice 6) JSONNET 7) INI 8) HCL 9) XML 10) Dahll (maybe?). My point here is that while YAML has a lot to be desired it's still very useful for most implementations and is better than many of the alternatives.