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The Norway Problem

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Re: The Norway Problem

#191

Post by atombender »

The world desperately needs a replacement for YAML.

TOML is fine for configuration, but not an adequate solution for representing arbitrary data.

JSON is a fine data exchange format, but is not particularly human-friendly, and is especially poor for editable content: Lacks comments, multi-line strings, is far too strict about unimportant syntax, etc.

Jsonnet (a derivative of Google's internal configuration language) is very good, but has failed to reach widespread adoption.

Cue is a newer Jsonnet-inspired language that ticks a lot of boxes for me (strict, schema support, human-readable, compact), but has not seen wide adoption.

Protobuf has a JSON-like text format that's friendlier, but I don't think it's widely adopted, and as I recall, it inherits a lot of Protobufisms.

Dhall is interesting, but a bit too complex to replace YAML.

Starlark is a neat language, but has the same problem as Dhall. It's essentially a stripped-down Python.

Amazon Ion [1] is neat, but I've not seen any adoption outside of AWS.

NestedText [2] looks promising, but it's just a Python library.

StrictYAML [3] is a nice attempt at cleaning up YAML. But we need a new language with wide adoption across many popular languages, and this is Python only.

Any others?

[1] https://amzn.github.io/ion-docs/

[2] https://nestedtext.org/

[3] https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/

Re: The Norway Problem

#192

Post by rootusrootus »

lainga wrote: post #177
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…

We had a Grafana dashboard where one of the columns was a short Git hash. One day, a commit got the hash `89e2520`, which Grafana's frontend helpfully decided to display as "+infinity". Presumably it was parsing 89E+2520.

Ha, that reminds me of some work I was doing just yesterday, implementing a custom dictionary for a postgres full text search index. Postgres has a number of mappings that you can specify, and it picks which one based on a guess of what the data represents. I got bit by a string token in this same format, because it got interpreted as an exponential number.

Re: The Norway Problem

#193

Post by pdkl95 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #148
sokoloff wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t compare them, it just counts down. If I enter 1-3-0-start, I get 90 seconds of cooking. If I enter 9-9-start, I get 99 seconds of cooking, so in that sense, 99 > 130. If I want about 90 seconds, I’ll use 88 as it’s faster to enter (fewer finger movements).

I've done the same thing for decades! Soul mates?

Vi Hart - "How to Microwave Gracefully"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9E0zSpULFY

Re: The Norway Problem

#194

Post by rootusrootus »

sneak wrote: post #168
sokoloff wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might like this one as well. Load soap into the dishwasher after emptying rather than after loading . If the soap dispenser is closed, the dishes are dirty.

My rule is that loading the dishwasher means that one loads all the available dishes, and runs it, even if it's only x% full. We use the (large) sink as an input buffer. If the dishwasher has dishes in it and it's not running, they're clean.

This is exactly our algorithm as all. I can't really imagine flipping it the other way, since leaving dirty dishes in a dishwasher will just let them completely dry out, making it more likely they won't get fully clean when the cycle is eventually run.

Re: The Norway Problem

#196

Post by cesarb »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #119
Macha wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that they accept more than the spec dictates - do your JSON parsers accept e.g. the vs code config file (JSON with comments) or JSON with unquoted keys?

Can you name a JSON parser which accept comments or unquoted keys? I've never seen one

IIRC, Gson accepts unquoted keys.

Re: The Norway Problem

#197

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

Funny coincidence. Around 2000, I worked for a company that coined the term "Norway problem" for a different software problem.

Their product used an MVCC database (I think ObjectStore). One of their customers in Norway had a problem where updates to the database seemed to not show up. IIRC the problem was a bug in this company's software that caused MVCC to show an older version of the database content than expected.

Re: The Norway Problem

#198

Post by geraldbauer »

atombender wrote: post #191

The world desperately needs a replacement for YAML. TOML is fine for configuration, but not an adequate solution for representing arbitrary data. JSON is a fine data exchange format, but is not particularly human-friendly, and is especially poor for editable content: Lacks comments, multi-line strings, is far too strict about unimportant syntax, etc. Jsonnet (a derivative of Google's internal configuration language)…

You might look at JSON Next variants (if you remember - "classic" JSON is a subset of YAML), see https://github.com/json-next/awesome-json-next

My own little JSON Next entry / format is called JSON 1.1 or JSONX, that is, JSON with eXtensions, see https://json-next.github.io

Re: The Norway Problem

#199

Post by c-cube »

nightcracker wrote: post #139
lelanthran wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.) But then it's inconsistent and has unnecessary complexity because now there's one (or more) exceptions to the rules to r…

Have you ever used Python? If you did you really wouldn't be saying this. There isn't an exception. The semicolon is used to put multiple statements on a single line. That's it's only use, and that's the only time it's 'needed' - no exceptions.

But python has instead the "insert \ sometimes" rule, which isn't better.
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