this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
1238 points (98.4% liked)

Programmer Humor

32472 readers
465 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Alright, the YAML spec is a dang mess, that I'll grant you, but it seems pretty easy for my human eyes to read and write. As for JSON -- seriously? That's probably the easiest to parse human-readable structured data format there is!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (3 children)

it is anything but easy to read if your entire file does not fit on a single screen.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

What data format is easy to read if it fills more than the entire screen?

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

what kind of config file is short enough to fit on a single screen with line breaks?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My biggest gripe is that human eyes cannot in fact see invisible coding characters such as tabs and spaces. I cannot abide by python for the same reason.

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

You can set those things to be visible in many editors. Its ugly tho

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

Until you're doing an online course in a simplistic web editor. Don't ask me how I know 🥲

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

How do you... Oh sorry

But yeah that sounds unpleasant

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

The language should just let me specify which character I want for that. I would use ">".

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

It would be a compiler directive, I think. Or let me type "end if" and just disregard the coding indentation

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

That'd be an editor thing rather than a language thing, I would have thought. It's probably configurable in some

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

We're we are going we don't need any comments.

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

I don't know much apart from the basics of YAML, what makes it complicated for computers to parse?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

the spec is 10 chapters. everything is unquoted by default, so parsers must be able to guess the data type of every value, and will silently convert them if_they are, but leave them alone otherwise. there are 63 possible combinations of string type. "no" and "on" are both valid booleans. it supports sexagesimal numbers for some reason, using the colon as a separator just like for objects. other things of this nature.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Yes, the classic "no" problem of YAML. But the addition of the comments is very nice.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Sometimes it's a space, sometimes its a tab, and sometimes it's two spaces which might also be a tab but sometimes it's 4 spaces which means 2 spaces are just whack And sometimes we want two and four spaces because people can't agree.

But do we want quotes or is it actually a variable? Equals or colon? Porque no los dos?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Those formats are not for humans to read or write. Those are for parsers to interpret.