41–50 of 144 posts
I find it remarkable that YAML has become our goto for configuration when it is riddled with parsing traps and inconsistent behaviour that catches out even experienced developers
It's because other config formats aren't as expressive.
Oh yeah it is literally the best of a bad bunch in my opinion
I'm hopeful of languages like CUE https://cuelang.org/
Almost all of this is solved by basically putting quotes around strings. Yaml has its uses cases where you want things json doesnt do like recursion or anchors/aliases/tags. Or at least it has had - perhaps cue/dhall/hcl solves things better. Jsonnet is another. I havent tried enough to test how much better they are.
More seriously: this is a good overview of the reasons I dislike YAML as a web configuration language. There's too much overlap between the "friendly" auto-type-determination in YAML and the symbols used in web tech, from colons to Norway having a TLD. It wouldn't be so bad if yaml parsers could use expected type of each value as a hint, but that's not a feature in any parser I've met, so I'd rather just not use yaml for anything that's going to end up describing a web service.
I find it remarkable that YAML has become our goto for configuration when it is riddled with parsing traps and inconsistent behaviour that catches out even experienced developers
So... what are the good alternatives to yaml? For quite some time I thought toml, but the way you can spread e.g. lists all over the document can also cause some headaches. Dhall is exactly my kind of type fest but you can hit a hard brick wall because the type system is not as strong as you think.
What about KDL ( https://kdl.dev/ ) or Pkl ( https://pkl-lang.org/ )?
Can't take this seriously if XML isn't listed as an alternative.
In the mean time, I’m very much enjoying KDL.
We found yaml to be a great exchange format for electronic exam data. It allows us to put student submitted answers and source code into a yaml file and there is no weird escaping. It's very readable with a text editor. And then we just add notes and a score as a list below and then there's the next submission. For readability of large blocks of texts that may or may not contain various special characters and newline…