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The Norway Problem

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Re: The Norway Problem

#211

Post by teddyh »

spion wrote: post #99
goatinaboat wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ctrl-\, Ctrl-], Ctrl-^ and Ctrl-_ for file, group, record and unit separator, respectively.

However, your tty driver, terminal or program are all likely to eat them or munge them. Also, virtually nothing actually uses these characters for these purposes.

Re: The Norway Problem

#212

Post by Nihilartikel »

mc10 wrote: post #208
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)…

S-expressions are super easy to parse and are fairly easy for humans to read. See e.g. using s-expressions in OCaml: https://dev.realworldocaml.org/data-serialization.html

Apropos of this, in Clojure-land the idiomatic serialization is, EDN [1], which is pretty ergonomic to work with IMO, since in most cases it is the same as a data-literal in Clojure.

My feeling is that :keywords reduce the need and temptation to conflate strings and boolean/enumerations that occurs when there's no clear way to convey or distinguish between a string of data and a unique named 'symbol'. I miss them when I'm in Pythonland.

[1] https: https://www.compoundtheory.com/clojure-edn-walkthrough/

Re: The Norway Problem

#214

Post by svnpenn »

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 seem pretty quick to disregard TOML. I switched all my JSON and YAML for TOML. Do you care to detail what is missing?

Re: The Norway Problem

#215

Post by korijn »

Edit: downvoters, thanks! I realize this is not an easily agreeable opinion ("let's all chant 'death to YAML!'") but it's really easy to avoid losing money on something like this. Just do proper testing.

Aren't you setting yourself up for surprises if you write file formats such as TOML and YAML without reading the documentation, learning and experimenting first? How about unit testing? Or verifying the type in your config parser? Have you tried opening your site in the norway config on your development or testing environment? Or even in production? It all seems very basic and not at all blog post or even HN worthy.

I'm going to assume the authors still haven't learned their lesson and are going to experience many more surprises in the future working with plain text file formats.

Re: The Norway Problem

#216

Post by goatinaboat »

teddyh wrote: post #211
spion wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you write them though

Ctrl-\, Ctrl-], Ctrl-^ and Ctrl-_ for file, group, record and unit separator, respectively. However, your tty driver, terminal or program are all likely to eat them or munge them. Also, virtually nothing actually uses these characters for these purposes.

virtually nothing actually uses these characters for these purposes.

Right. Which is why we have all these hilarious escaping and interpolation problems. Any why programmers will never be taken seriously by real engineers. It's like we have cement mixed and ready to go but we decide to go and forage for mud instead and think that makes us cleverer than the cement guys.

Re: The Norway Problem

#217

Post by tormeh »

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)…

Also RON: https://github.com/ron-rs/ron

A bit like JSON5, but I believe even more advanced.

Re: The Norway Problem

#219

Post by brohee »

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.

The "Wat?" Talk got quite a few example and is hilarious.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

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