YAML document from hell (2023) • Hacker News Board

Re: YAML document from hell (2023)

#141

Post by clayhacks » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 1:10 AM UTC

unconed wrote: post #97

com2kid wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious - What major flaws does TOML have? I've used it before and it seems like a simple no-nonsense config language. Plenty of blog articles about the flaws behind YAML, I don't really see complaints about TOML!

TOML is basically a formalization of the old INI format, which only existed in ad-hoc implementations. It's not really a "language", just a config data syntax like JSON. It doesn't have major footguns because it doesn't have a lot of surface area. The various features it has for nesting and arrays make it convenient to write, but can make it harder to read. There is no canonical serialization of a TOML document, as f…

I believe TOML can always be serialized to JSON. And TOML is in the python standard library in newer pythons. It’s also used as the suggest format for `pyproject.toml` in python

Re: YAML document from hell (2023)

#142

Post by smartbit » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:09 AM UTC

bertman wrote: post #9

Discussion from 3 years ago, when this was originally posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34351503 , 566 points, 358 comments

Archive of sept 18, 2025 https://web.archive.org/web/20250918212908/https://ruudvanas... as site seems down today.

Re: YAML document from hell (2023)

#143

Post by pbronez » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 12:12 PM UTC

Kostarrr wrote: post #13

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.

The author of this article created RDL:

> RCL is a domain-specific language for generating configuration files and querying json documents. It extends json into a simple, gradually typed, functional programming language that resembles Python and Nix.

https://github.com/ruuda/rcl

https://rcl-lang.org

Re: YAML document from hell (2023)

#144

Post by burnt-resistor » Fri, Sep 26, 2025, 6:11 AM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #64

gchamonlive wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ansible isn't a gold standard for docs. The docs are updated and maintained, but the underlying interfaces aren't consistent and that leaks to the docs. One can only wonder why, maybe different developers with different ideas for conventions without a style guide. Ansible is a wonderful tool though, if you can excuse these idiosyncrasies.

> Ansible is a wonderful tool though, if you can excuse these idiosyncrasies. The only advantage Ansible has is how easy it is to start with it - you don't need to deploy agents or even understand a lot about how it works. Trouble is, it doesn't really scale. It's pretty slow when running against a bunch of machines, and large configurations get unwieldily quickly (be it because of YAML when in large documents its im…

Chef is easy to run in solo mode too, but too many people just religiously hate Ruby and the flexibility of imperative configuration. CINC is the debranded libre version.