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Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

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Re: Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

#31

Post by deckar01 »

freyir wrote: post #17
laumars wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree about the double bracket syntax however I don't think that is part of the specification any more, instead nested structures use a dot notation inside single brackets. Both solutions do still feel like a hack though, but the dot notation is definitely less ugly. That all said, for flatter schema's I do personally think TOML is more readable than it's JSON, YAML and XML counterparts. If there is one thing I did…

> for flatter schema's I do personally think TOML is more readable than it's JSON, YAML and XML Yes. But for nested data, I find TOML becomes the least readable and I have to fall back to YAML or JSON. Maybe we need just one more ML...

I disagree. The way JSON and YAML nest data with indentation forces data to be disconnected from it's property chain when there are multiple large items at each level. TOML seems to provide a solution to that by allowing deeply nested paths to be declare explicitly at the top level for each item. You get to choose how to split the paths into containers instead of being locked into a 1-to-1 tree structure.

Re: Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

#32

Post by runjake »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #27

Used to be called "INI file" in the past... In any case I'm glad to see it in several open source projects (Mailtrain for example). It's so much easier to read for humans than JSON.

As mentioned in the source link, the INI format is not standardized. This is an attempt at a standardized format similar to INI.

Re: Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

#33

Post by mojombo »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #27

Used to be called "INI file" in the past... In any case I'm glad to see it in several open source projects (Mailtrain for example). It's so much easier to read for humans than JSON.

Yeah, TOML is definitely INI inspired, but there is no canonical INI spec. I wouldn't say that TOML is INI, though. INI files still exist in their variously poorly specified ways.

Re: Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

#34

Post by jxub »

skrebbel wrote: post #22

If only package.json had been package.toml

Would that be hard to implement for npm/yarn? I'm sure that transforming TOML to JSON on the fly could be added as a step somewhere, resulting in changes to the package manager or just a wrapper command.

Stylistically, I agree with you as TOML is clean and well thought. Moreover, TOML has support for more data types that JSON lacks leading to ugly workarounds (floats as strings anyone?). The main advantage of JSON is that its encoding/decoding is included in JS as it is, and it's generally deeply ingrained in the Node community.

Re: Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

#35

Post by afraca »

mojombo wrote: post #26
afraca wrote: post #21

Does anyone know why such a "joke proposal" (as stated by the author itself) was chosen for pretty significant projects like pip and cargo? (edit: I tried to say it began as something small and personal) (Well, I guess there's not that much to win/lose in the area of config languages, but still) (Also, I think it works pretty well, so this is not to downplay TOML!)

Well, it was only a joke to begin with. I couldn't stand the complexity or ambiguity of YAML and one night I had a few drinks and banged out my thoughts on something better. When people started writing implementations, I realized that TOML might actually have legs and started tightening it up and removing the snarky bits. I guess these projects felt the same pain I did about config files and presto! I think the moral…

Thanks for response. I edited my response to be less snarky. Good job and thanks for the moral of the story.

Re: Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

#36

Post by KirinDave »

mojombo wrote: post #10

Hey, Tom here (creator of TOML). Fun to see TOML on HN again! Since I first wrote a (mostly) joke proposal for TOML 5 years ago, TOML has been adopted by a number of prominent projects such as Cargo, Hugo, Pipenv, and others. TOML is especially well suited for projects that need a simple configuration file that maps unambiguously to a hash table. There are still some weaknesses in TOML that make it non-optimal for la…

Hi Tom. Dave here. I like a lot of the features in TOML, but I'm curious, can I have a pony?

(Folks downvoting, PLEASE JUST LET PEOPLE HAVE JOKES EVERY NOW AND THEN)

Re: Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

#37

Post by niftich »

afraca wrote: post #21

Does anyone know why such a "joke proposal" (as stated by the author itself) was chosen for pretty significant projects like pip and cargo? (edit: I tried to say it began as something small and personal) (Well, I guess there's not that much to win/lose in the area of config languages, but still) (Also, I think it works pretty well, so this is not to downplay TOML!)

There's no one clear place to point to about how the decision was made for Cargo, but some nuggets have been left by authors [1]. The gist seems to be that JSON (and YAML, per that comment) was considered a poor format to author and maintain a config file in, and YAML had no lib in Rust and there was no appetite for anyone to write one.

Pip's choice was made for them in the form of PEP 518 [2]. The authors of PEP 518 explain their rationale [2][3], which largely boils down to XML being too wordy and awkward to hand-edit, JSON awkward to hand-edit, various formats used by existing python tooling were underspecified and implementation-dependent, and YAML's python parsers being fairly complex and hard to vendor.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938388 [2] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0518/ [3] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0518/#other-file-formats

Re: Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

#38

Post by mojombo »

niftich wrote: post #23

The news here is (presumably) the announcement of version 0.5.0 a few days prior [1], which includes several clarifications, rollup changes, and enhancements that accumulated over the last 3 years. In my opinion, one of the more useful features was the addition of Joda-style datetimes [2][3][4][5], which disambiguates between various kinds of datetime constructs aren't interchangeable yet commonly conflated. It's fai…

Glad you like them, we spent quite a bit of time getting them right! Datetimes are a horrible mess of complexity, but hopefully over time languages and tools around them can standardize on a set of common primitives to make all our lives a bit less horribly messy. =)

Re: Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

#40

Post by mojombo »

KirinDave wrote: post #36
mojombo wrote: post #10

Hey, Tom here (creator of TOML). Fun to see TOML on HN again! Since I first wrote a (mostly) joke proposal for TOML 5 years ago, TOML has been adopted by a number of prominent projects such as Cargo, Hugo, Pipenv, and others. TOML is especially well suited for projects that need a simple configuration file that maps unambiguously to a hash table. There are still some weaknesses in TOML that make it non-optimal for la…

Hi Tom. Dave here. I like a lot of the features in TOML, but I'm curious, can I have a pony? (Folks downvoting, PLEASE JUST LET PEOPLE HAVE JOKES EVERY NOW AND THEN)

Hi Dave! Ponies come standard in TOML, you just have to know where to look. =)
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