In my opinion no one should be using Notepad for programming work or configurations that are more than 1-2 dozen lines. Nano is about the same: It's a
text editor with no inherent tooling for configuration files and syntax support.
A construction worker can't complain that nails are hard to use because they showed up to work with a baseball bat. Or that they're designed badly because they brought a soft aluminum hammer with a tiny head instead of one made with a stronger metal and large impact surface. Tooling is important. Vim and several graphical editors have syntax support. Notepad++ if you're on Windows.
> YAML syntax is more prone than Python to parsing correctly but producing unwanted semantics when you make a mistake.
If you made a mistake, you made a mistake. Why do you expect a program with a mistake to work correctly? Use tooling which prevents you from making mistakes. And the particulars of YAML semantics are orthogonal to how your editor handles it. Yes = True, No = False, etc., for better or worse, but that's got nothing to do with your editor.
> many/most people editing YAML files don't know YAML syntax very well compared to this scenario. If their knowledge of English was at the same level, misplaced whitespace would not be chief of their problems in a graded English paper.
I wholeheartedly agree. So if a programmer complained to me that they were having issues related to inconsistency with whitespace, I would be suspect of their general programming abilities and would start reading their code to determine if the problem lies deeper than just getting an extra space here or there: Incorrect tooling, linting, sloppiness, inattention to detail... All of these things get in the way of well-written software.
As for whitespace in general, and the fact that it's harder for linters to determine and highlight if a block is correctly scoped without enclosures... Python and others have this same issue.
> It is of course a structurally valid (philosophically consistent) argument that people should not make mistakes and they should suffer when they do, but this goes generally against the consensus of configuration language usability thinking.
True, and I agree. Everyone makes mistakes even with things as simple as rote data entry. This is why tooling is incredibly important.
Tightrope-walking at great heights is incredibly dangerous. Practitioners accept this danger. They typically wear harnesses to mitigate the danger of falling. Of course, some people like to live on the edge and set records involving no harnesses. If someone like Dean Potter fell while walking a tight-rope freeform with no harness and plunged to their death, their last thought wouldn't be, "Shit, I knew that tightrope was poorly designed and dangerous," it will be "Shit, I wish I'd been wearing a harness."
We can't remove our harnesses and then complain that mistakes are too frequent and costly.