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Why YAML sucks? (programming.dev)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 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] 35 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Because people over use it. YAML is pretty good for short config files that need to be human readable but it falls apart with complex multi line strings and escaping.

I think there are much better clearly delimited for machine reading purposes formats out there that you should prefer if you're writing a really heavy config file and, tbh, I think for everything else .ini is probably "good enough".

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (1 children)

At least use TOML if you like ini, there is no ini spec but TOML can look quite similar.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

Strong agree. It's also the absolute best at expressing really long documents of configuration/data.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I agree - YAML is not suitable for complex cases that people use it in, like ~~Terraform~~ and Home Assistant. My pet peeve is a YAML config in a situation that really calls for more abstraction, like functions and variables. I'd like to see more use of the class of configuration languages that support that stuff, like Dhall, Cue, and Nickel.

There is another gotcha which is that YAML has more room for ambiguity than, say, JSON. YAML has a lot of ways to say true and false, and it's implicit quoting is a bit complex. So some values that you expect to be strings might be interpreted as something els.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

For those highly complex situations is Lua still viewed as the ideal solution? Lua is sort of legendary for game configuration and seems to strike a good expressiveness/accessibility balance for modders and the casually technical.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I think it depends. Lua is great for scripting - like when X happens do Y. I agree that makes sense for a case like Home Assistant. Sometimes you really want the result to be a data structure, not an interactive program, in which case I think more sophisticated configuration (as opposed to scripting) languages might be better.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What YAML does Terraform use? HCL is similar but different enough to YAML.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh, thanks for calling that out. I think I may have mixed up some of the frustrations I experienced at an old job.

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

Maybe you're thinking of Ansible?

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

Yes, there's a good example. Ansible would make more sense if its configuration language was Nix...

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

But if one is already using nix, then just use nix