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The Norway Problem

hitchdev.com

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Re: The Norway Problem

#91

Post by goatinaboat »

WalterBright wrote: post #47

> The most tragic aspect of this bug, howevere, is that it is intended behavior according to the YAML 2.0 specification. This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it. Other bad ideas that resurface constantly: 1. implicit declaration of variables 2. don't really need a ; as a statement terminator 3. assert shoul…

This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it.

It's a bad idea because ASCII already includes dedicated characters for field separator, record separator and so on. These could easily be made displayable in a text editor if you wanted just as you can display newlines as ↲. Anyone who invents a format that involves using normal printable characters as delimiters and escaping them when you need them, is, I feel very confident in saying, grotesquely and malevolently incompetent and should be barred from writing software for life. CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, all guilty.

Re: The Norway Problem

#92

Post by adwn »

azernik wrote: post #24

YAML had a worse example, once. For the ease of entering time units YAML 1.1 parsed any set of two digits, separated by colons, as a number in sexagesimal (base 60). So 1:11:00 would parse to the integer 4260, as in 1 hour and 11 minutes equals 4260 seconds. Now try plugging MAC addresses into that parser. The most annoying part is that the MAC addresses would only be mis-parsed if there were no hex digits in the str…

> For the ease of entering time units YAML 1.1 parsed any set of two digits, separated by colons, as a number in sexagesimal (base 60).

This is a mind-boggling level of idiocy. Even leaving aside the MAC address problem, this conversion treats "11:15" (= 675) different from "11:15:00" (= 40500), even though those denote the same time, while treating "00:15:00" (15 minutes past midnight) and "15:00" (3 in the afternoon) the same.

Re: The Norway Problem

#93

Post by anticristi »

masklinn wrote: post #82
trhway wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XML with a convenient UI tools to edit should have fit the bill. Yet, for whatever reason a convenient UI tool would never happen to be there when needed, and thus scared and tired of manual editing of XML the world have embraced YAML.

> XML with a convenient UI tools to edit should have fit the bill. "You need this special tool to work" immediately and instantly rules out "easy to edit". Or makes the debate irrelevant: every format is easy to edit if you have "a convenient UI" to do it for you.

Opening XMLs in ZIP containers is easy! Just spin up Word. :)

Re: The Norway Problem

#94

Post by anticristi »

kstenerud wrote: post #52
anticristi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me sad. It's 2021 and we still haven't figure out how to serialize configuration in a format that is easy-to-edit and predictable.

This is the problem space I'm targeting with https://concise-encoding.org/ * Text AND binary so that humans can edit easily, and machines can transmit energy and bandwidth efficiently. * Carefully designed spec to avoid ambiguities (and their security implications). * Strong type support so you're not using all kinds of incompatible hacks to serialize your data. * Versioned, because there's no such thing as the perfe…

Nice! I like some concepts that this format proposes, but the `@` and `|` modifier feels a bit too "loaded".

Re: The Norway Problem

#95

Post by eitland »

lunfard00 wrote: post #32
eitland wrote: post #13

There exists a couple of mainstream languages that are full of these sorts of interesting behavior, one of them is supposedly cool and productive and the other is supposedly ugly and evil.

and yet I don't see anyone complain about bash which is arguably far worse than those 2. When things get hard on bash, you will start to see python scripts on CI and whole thing is complete unreadable mess

I'd not consider bash a

1. mainstream

2. programming language

(of course technically it is a programming language, but it is also more precisely a scripting language)

Re: The Norway Problem

#96

Post by bmn__ »

Aeolun wrote: post #71
bmn__ wrote: post #69

The problem is insufficiently analysed by the article author and the commenters in this thread so far. It is very superficial. The recent thread "Can’t use iCloud with “true” as the last name" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26364993 went deeper. Let me take up its relevant particulars into this thread. The article author hitchdev does not say it outright, but it is heavily implied that the YAML file was edited…

> never edit YAML by hand and always use a serialiser I don’t follow this. If yaml is your config format, and you are not editing it by hand, what are you editing?

I work on the deserialisation. This is a one-liner in many programming languages.

Re: The Norway Problem

#97

Post by jmartrican »

It seems like we need to treat yaml like json and quote all strings. Would that help resolve these issues? Just trying to figure out a rule I can implement to prevent these issues.

Re: The Norway Problem

#98

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

atleta wrote: post #77
WalterBright wrote: post #47

> The most tragic aspect of this bug, howevere, is that it is intended behavior according to the YAML 2.0 specification. This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it. Other bad ideas that resurface constantly: 1. implicit declaration of variables 2. don't really need a ; as a statement terminator 3. assert shoul…

I agree with the general observation, but the need for ";" ? Quite a few languages (over a few generations) have been doing fine without the semicolon. Just to mention two: python and haskell. (Yes, python has the semicolon but you'll only ever use it to put multiple statements on a single line.)

> Yes, python has the semicolon but you'll only ever use it to put multiple statements on a single line.

This is also true of Haskell btw.

Re: The Norway Problem

#99

Post by spion »

goatinaboat wrote: post #91
WalterBright wrote: post #47

> The most tragic aspect of this bug, howevere, is that it is intended behavior according to the YAML 2.0 specification. This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it. Other bad ideas that resurface constantly: 1. implicit declaration of variables 2. don't really need a ; as a statement terminator 3. assert shoul…

This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it. It's a bad idea because ASCII already includes dedicated characters for field separator, record separator and so on. These could easily be made displayable in a text editor if you wanted just as you can display newlines as ↲. Anyone who invents a format that involves…

how do you write them though

Re: The Norway Problem

#100

Post by Cu3PO42 »

atleta wrote: post #77
WalterBright wrote: post #47

> The most tragic aspect of this bug, howevere, is that it is intended behavior according to the YAML 2.0 specification. This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it. Other bad ideas that resurface constantly: 1. implicit declaration of variables 2. don't really need a ; as a statement terminator 3. assert shoul…

I agree with the general observation, but the need for ";" ? Quite a few languages (over a few generations) have been doing fine without the semicolon. Just to mention two: python and haskell. (Yes, python has the semicolon but you'll only ever use it to put multiple statements on a single line.)

Haskell has the semicolon for the same reason!
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