Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 265 posts

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#51

Post by eponeponepon »

nly wrote: post #44
bhaak wrote: post #15

What's with all the XML hate? Of course, doing everything in XML is a stupid idea (e.g. XSLT and Ant) and thanks heaven that hype is over. But if I want something that is able to express data structures customized by myself, usually with hierarchical data that can be verified for validity and syntax (XML Schemas or old-school DTD), what other options are there? Doing hierarchical data in SQL is a bitch and if you wan…

I personally miss having schemas and XSLT in JSON. > doing everything in XML is a stupid idea (e.g. XSLT and Ant) XSLT actually made a lot of sense. If everyone writes code to transform format1 to format2 then what you end up with a lot of slightly different transformations. Its main downfall, just like XML itself, was that it was annoying and time consuming to write. How would you replace all this if you moved away…

> it was annoying and time consuming to write.

It remains annoying and time-consuming :) But there's no better option for reliably creating valid EPUBs to a predetermined business specification.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#52

Post by turnip1979 »

buster wrote: post #42
turnip1979 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be specific, JSON syntax is a subset of YAML version 1.2. However, I hate YAML with a passion. It is worse than XML in my books. I can usually read JSON fine. I can also read XML in many cases. For the life of me, I just can't read YAML. It has something to do with "-", line indentation and different ways of writing lists. Of course, someone will say YAML is technically better ...

Different for me, i would prefer YAML over XML or JSON

Do you use your naked eyes or do you have any tool recommendations? I don't see YAML going away so I'd better deal :)

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#53

Post by halflings »

bananas wrote: post #32
Sharlin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is probably that 99.999% of all XML use cases don't use (or need) the verification aspect. For all of those, XML is overkill. Besides, surely it would be possible to design a verification layer on top of JSON, for instance - the fact that one does not currently exist does not mean that XML (and abuse of XML!) should not be criticized.

One of the core aspects of XML that is really important is that no typing is inferred by the structure of the file unlike JSON. JSON is by nature tied to the JavaScript type system which is sparse and inaccurate. For example, if you look at the following: { "name": "bob", "salary": 1e999 } Ah crap! Deserializer blew (in most cases silently converting the number to null) bob 1e999 No problem. The consumer can throw th…

JSON's semantics is that you represent numbers by their decimal representation.

In this particular case, you're giving a different representation, so of course you an pass it as a string.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#54

Post by _pmf_ »

rbehrends wrote: post #43
bhaak wrote: post #15

What's with all the XML hate? Of course, doing everything in XML is a stupid idea (e.g. XSLT and Ant) and thanks heaven that hype is over. But if I want something that is able to express data structures customized by myself, usually with hierarchical data that can be verified for validity and syntax (XML Schemas or old-school DTD), what other options are there? Doing hierarchical data in SQL is a bitch and if you wan…

XML is unnecessarily verbose, for the supposed sake of human readability. But used as a serialization format, it isn't really readable or editable by humans (except in the sense that a Turing machine is programmable): remember that the ML in XML stands for "markup language", and SGML, its predecessor, was designed as a way of marking up normal text, not littering data with angular brackets and identifiers. (XML/SGML…

You fail to address OP's question:

> But if I want something that is able to express data structures customized by myself, usually with hierarchical data that can be verified for validity and syntax (XML Schemas or old-school DTD), what other options are there?

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#55

Post by edraferi »

bananas wrote: post #32
Sharlin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is probably that 99.999% of all XML use cases don't use (or need) the verification aspect. For all of those, XML is overkill. Besides, surely it would be possible to design a verification layer on top of JSON, for instance - the fact that one does not currently exist does not mean that XML (and abuse of XML!) should not be criticized.

One of the core aspects of XML that is really important is that no typing is inferred by the structure of the file unlike JSON. JSON is by nature tied to the JavaScript type system which is sparse and inaccurate. For example, if you look at the following: { "name": "bob", "salary": 1e999 } Ah crap! Deserializer blew (in most cases silently converting the number to null) bob 1e999 No problem. The consumer can throw th…

This. Types are a huge pain in JSON, particularly the lack of a good date time type. BSON fixes tips, but only of you're using MongoDB and are willing to give up the "human readable" requirement outside of mongo.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#56

Post by _pmf_ »

nly wrote: post #44
bhaak wrote: post #15

What's with all the XML hate? Of course, doing everything in XML is a stupid idea (e.g. XSLT and Ant) and thanks heaven that hype is over. But if I want something that is able to express data structures customized by myself, usually with hierarchical data that can be verified for validity and syntax (XML Schemas or old-school DTD), what other options are there? Doing hierarchical data in SQL is a bitch and if you wan…

I personally miss having schemas and XSLT in JSON. > doing everything in XML is a stupid idea (e.g. XSLT and Ant) XSLT actually made a lot of sense. If everyone writes code to transform format1 to format2 then what you end up with a lot of slightly different transformations. Its main downfall, just like XML itself, was that it was annoying and time consuming to write. How would you replace all this if you moved away…

> Its main downfall, just like XML itself, was that it was annoying and time consuming to write.

And impossible to debug. Write once, do something else for some weeks, and trying to understand what you were doing at a later point is nearly impossible.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#58

Post by bsder »

xsace wrote: post #35
bananas wrote: post #13

I think this title is wrong. Firstly some clarification - this appears to just be about the persistence format for his dive log. It was XML, now it's git based with plain text. As someone who had to manage a system which worked with plain text files structured in a filesystem for a number of years in the 1990s, this is done to death already. You now end up with the following problems: locking, synchronising filesyste…

Maybe you want to wait till he release something. Cause you know, if he took months to get the big picture in mind, I doubt you grasp what he envision just by reading his comment.

Yes, because his design of git was so well-formed.

Git is so well-designed that expert users manage to trash their repositories and propagate the damage.

Maybe that's not a problem of libgit. But tools are both the infrastructure and the UI.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#59

Post by icebraining »

bananas wrote: post #32
Sharlin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is probably that 99.999% of all XML use cases don't use (or need) the verification aspect. For all of those, XML is overkill. Besides, surely it would be possible to design a verification layer on top of JSON, for instance - the fact that one does not currently exist does not mean that XML (and abuse of XML!) should not be criticized.

One of the core aspects of XML that is really important is that no typing is inferred by the structure of the file unlike JSON. JSON is by nature tied to the JavaScript type system which is sparse and inaccurate. For example, if you look at the following: { "name": "bob", "salary": 1e999 } Ah crap! Deserializer blew (in most cases silently converting the number to null) bob 1e999 No problem. The consumer can throw th…

And the following is not acceptable as it breaks the semantics of JSON and requires a secondary deserialisation step as strings ain't numbers...

XML strings ain't numbers neither. You can throw a big decimal deserialiser (e.g. as a custom deserialization adapter) at a JSON document as well.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#60

Post by bhaak »

babarock wrote: post #11
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #4

I don't quite get Linus' problem with XML for document markup (for anything else - config files, build scripts - sure, XML is horrible). Does anyone know any more details about what his specific gripe is? For me, asciidoc (which looks very similar, conceptually, to markdown) suffers from one huge problem: it's incomplete. Substituting symbols for words results in a more limited vocabulary, if that vocabulary is to re…

For those who missed it, here's what Linus wrote in the comments: "+Aaron Traas no, XML isn't even good for document markup. Use 'asciidoc' for document markup. Really. It's actually readable by humans, and easier to parse and way more flexible than XML. XML is crap. Really. There are no excuses. XML is nasty to parse for humans, and it's a disaster to parse even for computers. There's just no reason for that horribl…

Linus' adversion to XML explains also why parsing git's output is so abysmal inconsistent.

Subversion has a really good XML output for its log command which is a joy to use (and that's something to say if you work with XML) whereas with git you always have ugly format options that are most of the time underdocumented.

Post reply on HN