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?

  •  Vivendi   ( @Vivendi@lemmy.zip ) 
    link
    fedilink
    47
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    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

  •  mox   ( @mox@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
    link
    fedilink
    20
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    One pattern I’ve noticed is people seeking a language that’s better than {JSON,XML,INI,etc} at wrangling their slightly complex configuration files, noticing the additional features and type support offered by YAML, and assuming it will be a good solution.

    Then, as their configs grow ever larger and more complex, they discover that expressing them in YAML requires large sections of deep nesting, long item sequences, and line wrapping. The syntax style that they saw working well in other places (e.g. certain programming languages) breaks down quickly at that level of complexity, making it difficult for humans to correctly write and follow, and leading to frequent errors.

    YAML doesn’t suck for small stuff, IMHO. (But it is more complex than necessary for small stuff.)

    For things likely to grow to medium-large size or complexity, I would recommend either breaking up the data into separate files, or looking for a different config/serialization language.

  • I don’t like YAML because it’s overly complicated. The specification is like 80 pages long. How the hell did they think that was a good idea?

    JSON on the other hand is super simple. It doesn’t do more than it needs to.

    Just compare this: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

    With this: https://www.json.org/json-en.html

    The entire JSON specification is shorter than just the table of contents of the YAML specification!

    Another thing I like about JSON is that you can format it however you want with the whitespace. Want everything on one line? Just write everything on one line!

    If data can be represented as a JSON, then there’s generally only one way to represent it in JSON (apart from whitespace). In YAML the same data can be represented in 1000s of different ways. You pick one.

  • To paraphrase: There are two kinds of markup languages. Those that people complain about and those that nobody uses.

    There is no silver bullet that will work perfectly for all use cases and we also don’t want to use 100 different tools. So people use things that aren’t perfect. But they’re good enough. I don’t think YAML is perfect and I still use it, because people know it and there are tons of tools already available.

  • It sucks the same way Python sucks. Some people just really don’t like indentation-based syntax. I’m one of them, so I dislike both formats. However, if you groove on that sort of thing, I don’t think YAML is any worse than any other markup.

    Oddly, I get along with Haskell, which also used indentation for scoping/delimiting; I can’t explain that, except that, somehow, indentation-based syntax seems to fit better with functional languages. But I have no clear argument about why; it’s just an oddity in my aesthetics.

  •  LyD   ( @LyD@lemmy.ca ) 
    link
    fedilink
    123 months ago

    YAML works great for small config files, or situations where your configuration is fully declarative. Go look at the Kubernetes API with its resources.

    People think YAML sucks because everyone loves creating spaghetti config/templates with it.

    One reason it tends to become an absolute unholy mess is because people work around the declarative nature of those APIs by shoving imperative code into it. Think complicated Helm charts with little snippets of logic and code all over the place. It just isn’t really made for doing that.

    It also forces your brain to switch back and forth between the two different paradigms. It doesn’t just become hard to read, it becomes hard to reason about.

  •  demesisx   ( @demesisx@infosec.pub ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    10
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I used to think json was the best until I found json lines or line delimited json. Thank me later. I use it all the time. You can append until you’re blue in the face. It’s great for log files. Each line is a valid json file.

  • I hated yaml with every fiber of my being when first had to use it, but I really wanted to use HomeAssistant and see what I could do with it. I hated it a bit less when I started using docker compose. I started loving it when I started using it as a way to explain json to non-programming IT types, trying to explain it without braces and brackets seems to get across easier. I guess its more human readable, but as a result formatting has to be spot on (those indents and spaces replace the need for brackets and braces).

    One useful trick if you truly hate it but need it, write it in json, then just use a converter to change that into yaml.

  • It’s inconsistent and annoying. Expressive, yes. Gets it’s job done, yes. Absolute nightmare of a spec, YES.

    The fact that JSON is a subset of YAML should tell you everything about how bloated the spec is. And of course there’s the “no” funny things.

    Personally, my favourite way to write configs was using lua (because it was already part of the project so why not), but JSON does fine.