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YAML also expanded to add arbitrary scripting via a pile of bolt-on capabilities so that it's now a serialisation language that's Turing-complete, or that inclu

YAML also expanded to add arbitrary scripting via a pile of bolt-on capabilities so that it's now a serialisation language that's Turing-complete, or that includes Turing-complete capabilities within it, everything from: command: - /bin/sh - -c - rm -rf $HOME to: state: > {% set foo = states('...') %} {% set bar = states('...') %} {% if foo == FOO and bar == BAZ %} ... This makes it damn annoying to work with because everyone's way of doing it is different and since it's not a first-class element you have to rethink everything you want to do into strange patterns to work with how YAML does things.

xigoi 8mo ago
This scripting is not a part of YAML. It could be done in JSON as well: {"command": [ "/bin/sh", "-c", "rm -rf $HOME" ]} In fact, this is completely equivalent to your YAML.
- pseudohadamard 8mo ago
  The difference is that in YAML it's kind of expected (the second pseudocode example is from Home Assistant where almost everything nontrivial requires embedding scripting inside your YAML) while I've never seen it done in JSON.
  - xigoi 8mo ago
    Jupyter notebooks are a form of scripting in JSON. Anyway, all this is the fault of specific tools, not of YAML. This is like saying that laundry pods are bad because people eat them.
  - drysart 8mo ago
    The use cases for YAML that don't involve any sort of scripting vastly outnumber the use cases for YAML that involve embedding scripts into a document; so it's a little unfair and inaccurate to say that "in YAML it's kind of expected". It is more fair to say that if your document needs to contain scripting, YAML is a better choice than JSON; for the singular reason that YAML allows for unquoted multiline strings, which means you can easily copy/paste scripts in and out of a YAML document without needing to worry about escaping and unescaping quotes and newline characters when editing the document.

xigoi 8mo ago

This scripting is not a part of YAML. It could be done in JSON as well: {"command": [ "/bin/sh", "-c", "rm -rf $HOME" ]} In fact, this is completely equivalent to your YAML.

pseudohadamard 8mo ago
The difference is that in YAML it's kind of expected (the second pseudocode example is from Home Assistant where almost everything nontrivial requires embedding scripting inside your YAML) while I've never seen it done in JSON.
- xigoi 8mo ago
  Jupyter notebooks are a form of scripting in JSON. Anyway, all this is the fault of specific tools, not of YAML. This is like saying that laundry pods are bad because people eat them.
- drysart 8mo ago
  The use cases for YAML that don't involve any sort of scripting vastly outnumber the use cases for YAML that involve embedding scripts into a document; so it's a little unfair and inaccurate to say that "in YAML it's kind of expected". It is more fair to say that if your document needs to contain scripting, YAML is a better choice than JSON; for the singular reason that YAML allows for unquoted multiline strings, which means you can easily copy/paste scripts in and out of a YAML document without needing to worry about escaping and unescaping quotes and newline characters when editing the document.