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Why are we templating YAML?

leebriggs.co.uk

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Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#121

Post by basil-rash »

SamWhited wrote: post #32

As others in this thread have said: I ask this question all the time, except s/templating/using/. YAML is insanely over complicated; it's as bad or worse than XML for config files, and it doesn't even have the nice streaming mode. Not to mention that it's a bit of a security nightmare (seriously, who put pointers into the YAML spec?). And, on a more subjective note, YAML is just confusing: between all the significant…

If you think the whitespace is bad, just wait till you see the implicit casting: https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/why/implicit-typing-removed/

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#122

Post by lstamour »

krferriter wrote: post #86
bamboozled wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The killer feature for me over JSON is comment support, it's definitely useful to add todo comments etc.

Yeah this is a huge selling point of YAML. JSON should have comments added to the spec. The other benefit to YAML is human readability, which is usually better in YAML compared to JSON. A specific glaring example of this is when there are long string-literal snippets inside the document, in YAML this is massively more readable than in JSON.

> JSON should have comments added to the spec.

See also ~5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7325735

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#123

Post by jhanschoo »

basil-rash wrote: post #116
bamboozled wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The killer feature for me over JSON is comment support, it's definitely useful to add todo comments etc.

You can just use JSON with comments though. If you have sufficient control over the technology in question to be able to completely change it to a YAML parser, surely you can change it to be a JSON+Comment parser too. See: VS Code's config files.

But you can restrict yourself to JSON+Comments and call it YAML; it isn't idiomatic YAML, but it's still valid YAML.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#124

Post by hazz99 »

SamWhited wrote: post #33
bluedino wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I really dislike YAML I wasn’t aware anyone liked it

Tools keep using it even where it's the wrong tool for the job, so someone must like it, surely? I'm sure it will be just like XML where it's the trendy thing for a while in the early days, then everyone stops and hates it for a while. Except XML at least has a handful of applications where it's the right tool for the job (it has a nice streaming mode), YAML doesn't even have that.

YAML is great for simple human-editable configuration files. Its very easy to write, and can be picked up quite quickly.

Opting for YAML over XML/JSON/whatever doesn't make me a tool. It made life much easier for myself & my colleagues.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#125

Post by hazz99 »

jtdev wrote: post #119
Cyph0n wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is up with the strange comma positioning? I assume that’s just a stylistic choice?

It allows each line to be completely independent of it’s neighbors; you can comment and/or add lines without needing to touch neighboring lines. Also, it makes it visually easy to spot missing commas. Give it a try sometime, it’s actually quite nice.

Also makes nice file diffs!

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#126

Post by titanix2 »

Macha wrote: post #69
macspoofing wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's as bad or worse than XML for config files XML works very well for config files. It's schema-optional (but is there), well-specified, human-readable, has plethora of supporting technologies (making things like templating easy), and is well supported by every language. At the very least it is way better than JSON.

It's missing one important part for config files. It's tedious to write by hand.

XML is not tedious at all with the right tooling. For example a tool like Visual Studio IntelliSense proposes only elements and attributes valid in the context, automatically close tag, format the file and complete opening tags too so it makes editing XML file a breath.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#127

Post by bpicolo »

BossingAround wrote: post #27

I know I'm in a minority, but I really dislike YAML... I recently did a lot of Ansible and boy, at the beginning, I was just struggling a lot. Syntactic whitespace kills me. I don't like it in Python either, but for some reason, when I write Python, it's a lot easier. Maybe YAML is just a bit more complex (and Python has better IDE support..?)

Writing YAML is easily the part I hate most about writing/deploying software. It's unstructured, feedback cycles tend to be slow (e.g. when deploying k8s configs into prod), and you can't possibly write something useful without documentation pulled up. It's definitely easier to implement than purpose built DSLs, but it's not a good experience.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#128

Post by kross »

joeduffy wrote: post #57

My belief is that we've been slowly building up to using general purpose languages, one small step at a time, throughout the infrastructure as code, DevOps, and SRE journeys this past 10 years. INI files, XML, JSON, and YAML aren't sufficiently expressive -- lacking for loops, conditionals, variable references, and any sort of abstraction -- so, of course, we add templates to it. But as the author (IMHO rightfully) p…

I have been using ksonnet but that is now officially dead. Working with jsonnet seemed unnecessarily painful when coming from coding typescript. This information is quite timely and welcome, I'll look further at the ts example.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#129

Post by houqp »

joeduffy wrote: post #57

My belief is that we've been slowly building up to using general purpose languages, one small step at a time, throughout the infrastructure as code, DevOps, and SRE journeys this past 10 years. INI files, XML, JSON, and YAML aren't sufficiently expressive -- lacking for loops, conditionals, variable references, and any sort of abstraction -- so, of course, we add templates to it. But as the author (IMHO rightfully) p…

As a happy pulumi user, I have to say I am very impressed with the experience. An order of magnitude improvement on maintainability over our old terraform code base. Highly recommended.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#130

Post by nhooyr »

jtdev wrote: post #119
Cyph0n wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is up with the strange comma positioning? I assume that’s just a stylistic choice?

It allows each line to be completely independent of it’s neighbors; you can comment and/or add lines without needing to touch neighboring lines. Also, it makes it visually easy to spot missing commas. Give it a try sometime, it’s actually quite nice.

Wouldn't the same thing occur if it wasn't there at all?
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