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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* (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 (1 children)

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

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

That's a thorny question: Do comments need to be in the base standard, or can that be offloaded to those building on it? It doesn't look like it would be hard to have (comment "foo bar baz") in an expression and have a re-parser throw that out.

Is the complaint that no two groups of people will use the same comment standard if left to their own devices? It's not like the other data from different sources will always match up. What's one extra, and fairly easy to handle SNAFU?

That said, yes, I think I'd be more comfortable knowing there was an accepted comment format. The aesthetic seems to be Lisp-like, and I notice that the Lisp comment marker, the semicolon, is currently a reserved character, that is, it's illegal to use it unquoted. Maybe they're thinking of adding that at some point.

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

It doesn’t look like it would be hard to have (comment "foo bar baz") in an expression

That is pretty much what the official "solution" is for comments in package.json - add "//": "foo bar baz" keys to dictionaries and NPM will ignore them.

In practice it's terrible. You need real comments.