If need anything more complicated than simple $var substitution, it's time to use a general purpose scripting language with appropriate libraries to generate your data structure. A half-baked template DSL will never work.
Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
361–370 of 667 posts
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tabs aren't a problem Spaces aren't a problem. What is a problem is not picking one or the other. There's arguments for both sides but it is critical to just take a side. I'm sorry your side lost but it makes everything better to just go along with the consensus.
At one of my internships in the 90's, a developer I worked with solved the problem by never indenting. Every single line of code started at column 1.
It sounds like this is the origin story of Python. Whoever worked with this person made it their life’s mission to enforce proper indentation.
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dunno, to me YAML is the python of markup languages. YAML is decent at handling things like nesting and arrays, while TOML sucks at it. I don't dislike YAML that much. That being said, we knew since the dawn of C macros that templating languages which are not aware of syntax, are AWFUL. Likewise, writing Helm charts (the place I encountered YAML templating) is just horrible, but would be so much nicer is templates re…
The biggest issue I have with Yaml is that they forbid tabs. Their argument is that tabs are shown differently in every editor which is actually something I like. When you're looking for something deeply nested you can reduce the tab distance a bit, when that's not needed you can increase it to improve visibility of nesting levels. And forbidding it makes a one-keystroke action a two or four one. I really don't under…
I'm pretty sure most of the "spaces" people have their editor set up to convert the 'tab' key into multiple spaces.
Now excuse me while I duck under this table.
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#364From my vantage point it seems to have happened roughly like this
First we had arbitrary code that did something. Then we thought, "hey wouldn't it be nice if we could do this declaratively in a standard way using configuration instead?" Then we could reason about it more easily. But then came the realization "this declarative system isn't quite powerful enough, what if we could sprinkle some logic on top of it". "Hey wouldn't it be nice if we could go back to doing it declaratively? I guess we can just add the missing features to our not-turing-complete config language". "Wow now it can almost do everything I want.... but there is just this tiny little thing I want to do in addition, let's do templating!" etc
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#365We wrote a backend service at Lyft in Python and at some point needed to do some string interpolation for experimentation. In a rush someone implemented this in YAML (no new deps needed). This ended up being the bane of the teams existence. Almost impossible to test if something was going to break in runtime, could only verify it was valid yaml but many other things were infeasible, super hard to debug - it soured me on YAML for years.
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tabs aren't a problem Spaces aren't a problem. What is a problem is not picking one or the other. There's arguments for both sides but it is critical to just take a side. I'm sorry your side lost but it makes everything better to just go along with the consensus.
At one of my internships in the 90's, a developer I worked with solved the problem by never indenting. Every single line of code started at column 1.
Why did you leave an empty column at the start? :]
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#367To me YAML seems like the CoffeeScript of JSON, and unlike CoffeeScript I don’t understand why people are still using it. I guess XML and JSON are too verbose. But YAML is so far in the opposite direction, we get the same surprise conversions we’ve had in Excel ( https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr... ). Why is “on” a boolean literal (of course so are “true”, “false”, as well as “yes”, “no”,…
[dead]
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And forbidding it makes a one-keystroke action a two or four one. You can’t be serious
I prefer to keep my json to one line without white spaces, saves on disk space.
Ouch. The only problem with the obvious sarcastic tone of that comment is that there are plenty of people that do say exactly the same thing and mean it.
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
YAML is an amazing config language for simple to mildly complex configs. It's easier to read and write than JSON, and it only really breaks apart when you're heavily deviating from nested lists/dictionaries with string values. People use it everywhere because by the time it becomes painful you're already so invested it's not really worth the hassle of switching.
I, on the other hand, find it much harder to read and write even in very simple configs. I never know what the indent is supposed to be, I just press my spacebar until my editor stops complaining. I find it really hard to tell if a line is a new entry or a subset of the parent entry. I'm sure if I used it more it'd become easier, but my whole team doesn't understand it either. Luckily we only need it for GitHub confi…
YAML is (vaguely) a superset of JSON, so you can just use JSON (without tabs) and get your life back.
I don’t need a config language with no fewer that 6 subtly different ways of decoding a string to remember, and certainly not one with a spec longer than C’s. Compare to JSON’s, which (famously) fits on a postcard.
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#370To me YAML seems like the CoffeeScript of JSON, and unlike CoffeeScript I don’t understand why people are still using it. I guess XML and JSON are too verbose. But YAML is so far in the opposite direction, we get the same surprise conversions we’ve had in Excel ( https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr... ). Why is “on” a boolean literal (of course so are “true”, “false”, as well as “yes”, “no”,…
XML also has some other issues (no typing, to many ways to have maps but non seems to be the correct way etc.)
JSON just isn't mean to be written by humans (no comments).
But YAML is just horrible, like the whole accidental mistyping issues (NO => false) are just horrible and not acceptable IMHO. That it's a pretty complex thing doesn't help either.
I honestly don't understand why we (e.g. github actions) still use YAML for new thinks even knowing all the issues especially if we, there are many other well suited decent but less wide spread alternatives.