Great article, but I disagree with the conclusion. Hand-editing YAML is an absolute mine field. For non-developers editing it is a complete non-starter as they

Great article, but I disagree with the conclusion. Hand-editing YAML is an absolute mine field. For non-developers editing it is a complete non-starter as they can and will make mistakes. But even for developers it will make you pay for your relative ignorance of the spec. Pop quiz, can you tell me what's wrong with the following YAML snippet without running it through a YAML parser: FI: Finland NO: Norway SE: Sweden GB: United Kingdom Personally I find YAML to be a powerful serialization format for sanitized ruby data and that's it. Granted there can be major upgrade pains as demonstrated by this post (and believe me I've wrestled with severe pain from this upgrade), but I think these changes are likely to be few and far between. Bottom line is YAML is well-defined even if that spec if impossible for a human being to comprehend and internalize its nuance, and it has a special status in Ruby that makes it particularly useful for automation. But for human readable I say do yourself a favor and stick to TOML.