I feel that Yaml sucks. I understand the need for such markup language but I think it sucks. Somehow it’s clunky to use. Can you explain why?
Any language in which whitespace has syntactic value is intrinsically flawed.
Can’t speak to your specific issues, but that’s why yaml will always suck.
YAML sucks because, among other things, indenting it is not obvious.
In contrast, the only mistake of Python when it comes to whitespaces was allowing hard tabs, which makes it too easy to mix them if your editor is not configured.
Improper indentation stands out more than missing or unbalanced braces and it’s really not an issue to delimit code blocks.
As a serialization format, agree 100%, but would Python really be better if it switched to braces?
Yes it would - look at optional braces for short if expressions in C family languages and why it’s so discouraged in large projects. Terminating characters are absolutely worth the cost of an extra LoC
False dichotomy. Optional braces are bad practice because they mislead the programmer that is adding an additional clause to the block.
This misleading behavior wouldn’t happen in Python, as it would either be invalid syntax, or it would be part of the block.
Indentation problems are pretty obvious to the reader. Even more than missing or unbalanced braces.
I started in C before moving on to C++, Java, Ruby and Python.
I’ve had more bugs from missing braces than from misaligned whitespace because the latter is far more obvious when looking at a block of code.
I’m fine with python, because it’s consistent. In C I get nervous every time I see it.
obligatory goto fail;
To be pendantic, it’s level of indentation in Python that has semantic meaning, not whitespace.
The end of line also has semantic meaning. Both indentation and eol are whitespace.
Yes, I think so. The downside with Python comes when refactoring the code. There’s always this double checking if the code is correctly indented after the refactor. Sometimes small mistakes creep in.
It’s really hard to tell when Python code is incorrectly indented. It’s often still valid Python code, but you can’t tell if it’s wrong unless you know the intention of the code.
In order languages it’s always obvious when code is incorrectly indented. There’s no ambiguity.
It’s only hard to tell indentation in Python when the code block gets longer than about a screen, which is usually a sign the code should be refactored into smaller methods.
Can address it by writing code that doesn’t depend much on indentation, which also makes code more linear and easier to follow.
Haskell supports both semantic whitespace and explicit delimiters, and somehow almost everybody that uses the language disagrees with you.
But anyway, for all the problems of YAML, this one isn’t even relevant enough to point out. Even if you agree it’s a problem. (And I agree that the YAML semantic whitespace is horrible.) If YAML was a much better language, it would be worth arguing whether semantic whitespace breaks it or not.
Can people stop hating on shit?
FOR FUCKS SAKE, negative reinforcement dopamine has RUINED THE FUCKING NET.
EVERYWHERE I GO there’s someone bitching about something, hate circlejerks are unbelievably popular, people just love to hate on stuff.
You’re ruining your thought patterns with all these social media negativity bullshit.
Fucking TOML users hate on fucking YAML fucking C++ users hate Rust fucking Rust users hate literally everything under the sun and are insufferable to work with
EVERYONE, fucking CHILL
Yeah TBH I like yaml. Sure its not the best ever, but its not the worst it could possibly be.
For config its not terrible. For ansible playbooks its again… not terrible.
Why is everyone always hating on something which is just kinda mid.
I dream of a life where I use YAML but all my configs are stuck in XML. People can complain but there’s always worse options.
One nice thing about XML is that there’s an official way to link to the schema from within the document. If you do that you can easily automatically validate it, and even better you get fantastic IDE support via Red Hat’s LSP server. Live validation, hover for keys, etc.
It’s a really nice experience and JSON schema can’t really match it.
That said, XML just has the wrong data model for 99% of use cases.
Config is fine, but Yamls biggest problem is people use it to describe programs. For example: playbooks. For example: CI steps.
If YAML wasn’t abused in this way it would have a lot less hate.
What’s wrong with using YAML for CI? I mean, I use it for Gitlab CI, the underlying script it runs is just Bash.
If YAML and JSON were gripping my hands for dear life, dangling off of a cliff…
I would let both drop into the abyss so I could spend more time with INI.
Programmers hate everything. You could design a spec which serenades you with angel song and feeds you chocolate dipped grapes and someone would be like: This is awful, my usecase is being a dog.
Sure there aren’t many things that are universally loved. I mean I can’t really think of anything that doesn’t have some flaw.
But that doesn’t mean everything is equal! What would you rather program with, Visual Basic or Go? PHP or Typescript? If you polled people there are obvious winners.
Hey would you rather build from wood or steel?
What glue is better: 2 part epoxy or PVA?
Do you prefer soap or bleach as cleaning agent?
Would you rather build from wood or tissue paper?
What glue is better: 2 part epoxy or pritt stick?
Do you prefer soap or ash as a cleaning agent?
I think much of the issue with YAML is that it’s often paired with bad editors. You need a way to manage the whitespace, collapse sections, etc. Notepad doesn’t cut it.
