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Why YAML sucks? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I feel that Yaml sucks. I understand the need for such markup language but I think it sucks. Somehow it's clunky to use. Can you explain why?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

It's a rube goldberg footgun

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

YAML is fine if you use a subset (don't use the advanced features - not like you know those anyway) and use explicit strings (always add " to strings), otherwise things may be cast when you did not intend values to be cast.

Example:

country: NO (Norway) will be cast to country: False, because it'll cast no (regardless from casing) to false, and yes to true.

country: "NO" should not be cast.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

People are working on making S-Expressions a standard: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-rivest-sexp/

Note: This is just a draft, but improvements have been happening since 2023.

I probably won't like the parentheses, but I think I'll take it over yaml/json/whateverelse.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

That appears to not support comments. How they made that mistake after JSON is a mystery.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I like TOML: https://TOML.io

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I think much of the issue with YAML is that it's often paired with bad editors. You need a way to manage the whitespace, collapse sections, etc. Notepad doesn't cut it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I wish s-expression was a popular alternative. It's readable without the yaml issues.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (9 children)

Yes, they could've just used JSON. Totally pointless waste of time.

[–] xmunk 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So Poe's Law and all that... I really hope you're being sarcastic because having non-technical people hand edit JSON is a nightmare. It's also quite annoying to read without a lot of extra whitespace which most editors that'd help less technical folks omit... and comments to help highlight what different things mean are hacky, hard to read, and actually read as data.

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