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?
We all know it sucks. I have no idea why people use it instead of anything else. My workday is jammed with fucking ansible which, while also being so ghetto that we were easily doing more with less in 2002, uses So.much.fucking.yaml . Just when you think ansible couldn’t get more clunky and useless and slow, it also is configured in yaml.
White space/indentation as a construct of the syntax.
It’s why I have a hard time with python.
People have their likes and dislikes. Nothing wrong with that.
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.
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.
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.
cradles yaml in her hands and coos don’t you talk to my baby like that! she has potential !
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.
This comment is underrated, even if it rises to the top of all comments.
Pleased to have touched your life with levity, stranger.
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?
Unlike tissue paper yaml is actually fit for purpose. I actually don’t know of any lang that literally can’t run a program. The most you could stretch what you’re saying to is that some esolangs are akin to making bricks of packed tissues to build with. They are art projects not serious submissions though.
I don’t like js as much as anyone else but as evidenced by reality it works. Programmers need to stop sniffing their own farts, you have such strong opinions about the most insane shit when at most you should be talking about narrower scopes for use and trade offs.
I don’t hate YAML, but it has the same issues languages like PHP and JS introduce…there are unexpected corner cases that only exist because the designer wanted the language to be “friendly”
Sorry, what’s confusing the fact that
"Hi my name is {$this->name}"works and"Hi my name is {self::name}"is unintelligible gibberish! /s
it does what it needs to do: i don’t think it’s necessarily bad.
it’s for data not programming and it handles complex structures cleaner than json
My issue with it arises when data is not interpreted as I expected, like because of weird white space issues for example.
Because people over use it. YAML is pretty good for short config files that need to be human readable but it falls apart with complex multi line strings and escaping.
I think there are much better clearly delimited for machine reading purposes formats out there that you should prefer if you’re writing a really heavy config file and, tbh, I think for everything else
.iniis probably “good enough”.I agree - YAML is not suitable for complex cases that people us it in, like Terraform and Home Assistant. My pet peeve is a YAML config in a situation that really calls for more abstraction, like functions and variables. I’d like to see more use of the class of configuration languages that support that stuff, like Dhall, Cue, and Nickel.
There is another gotcha which is that YAML has more room for ambiguity than, say, JSON. YAML has a lot of ways to say
trueandfalse, and it’s implicit quoting is a bit complex. So some values that you expect to be strings might be interpreted as something els.What YAML does Terraform use? HCL is similar but different enough to YAML.
Oh, thanks for calling that out. I think I may have mixed up some of the frustrations I experienced at an old job.
Maybe you’re thinking of Ansible?
Yes, there’s a good example. Ansible would make more sense if its configuration language was Nix…
But if one is already using nix, then just use nix
For those highly complex situations is Lua still viewed as the ideal solution? Lua is sort of legendary for game configuration and seems to strike a good expressiveness/accessibility balance for modders and the casually technical.
At least use TOML if you like ini, there is no ini spec but TOML can look quite similar.
Strong agree. It’s also the absolute best at expressing really long documents of configuration/data.
Yes, they could’ve just used JSON. Totally pointless waste of time.
So Poe’s Law and all that… I really hope you’re being sarcastic because having non-technical people hand edit JSON is a nightmare. It’s also quite annoying to read without a lot of extra whitespace which most editors that’d help less technical folks omit… and comments to help highlight what different things mean are hacky, hard to read, and actually read as data.
JSON does lack comments. And numbers that are not 64 floats.
There’s a spec for json with comments. It’s better than yaml in every way.
Readability in general sucks
TFB, the numbers are not defined as 64 bits floats.
They are just not defined. At all.
Exactly that’s a job for the parser / consumer.
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.
Fun fact, since YAML is a superset of JSON, any JSON is a valid YAML. You can still use pure JSON.
I like yml. Clean to read, easy to use, supports comments.
Way easier to type than json!
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.
You can’t say python’s whitespace usage is as bad as yaml’s. YAML mixes 2 and 4 spaces all the time. Python scripts don’t run if you write this kind of crap.
And whitespaces is really just the tip of the iceberg of YAML problems…
YAML mixes 2 and 4 spaces
I think that’s a user thing and it doesn’t happen if you have a linter enforce 2 or 4.
That’s part of the problem. Different number of whitespaces indicate different nesting levels and the YAML spec does not enforce them. These two horrible YAMLs are valid and are not equivalent:
a: b: - c - d - e f: "ghi"a: b: - c - d - e f: "ghi"So it’s easy to enforce locally but you don’t have to. And it’s easy to see indentation on modern IDEs and you can even make your indents rainbows and collapse structures to make it easier to see what’s going on, but I guess since some people want to write it in vi without ALE or a barebones text editor, it’s bad? Like there are legit reasons it’s bad, and other people have mentioned them throughout the thread, but this seems like a pretty easy thing to deal with. I work with ansible a bunch and YAML rarely is where my problem is.
Jesus, just what I want to do with the devops team - spend a few weeks standardizing on an editor and configuring them to edit yaml.
A few weeks? How do you stay employed? How do you even feed yourself at that pace? Blocked on making a sandwich, I’ve got the wrong type of bread.
It’s three lines in an editor config file to standardize the indents across any editor: https://editorconfig.org/
In vscode, adding two extensions is all I need:, yamllint (if you don’t use linters, I don’t know how you do your job in any language) and rainbow indents. Atom had similar ones. I’m sure all IDEs are capable of these things. If you work at a place that forces you to use a specific editor and limits the way you can use it, that’s not YAML’s fault.
At a certain point, it’s your deficiencies that make a language difficult, not the language’s. Don’t blame your hammer when you haven’t heated the iron.
You know how many editor plugins I need to work with json? None.
YAML mixes 2 and 4 spaces all the time. Python scripts don’t run if you write this kind of crap.
Sure it does. You only need to be consistent within a block. Python’s syntax is ridiculous and solves problems that basically don’t exist.
All of my java/kotlin/rust/etc. code is trivially well formatted and can be done by my editor. Moving code blocks is trivial. Refactoring is easier when I didn’t need to hand -format the code just to make it work.
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.
Hard tabs are the only accessible option though. If you care about developers with a different vision capability than yours, the only correct indentation choice is tabs.
If, because of bad vision, someone needs to crank the font size way up, it’s very possible that they might need to work with a tabstop of 3, 2, or even just 1 space.
With tabs, this is user configurable. With spaces it isn’t.
In any modern editor it is configurable with spaces too
I now use Scala 3, and very happy with syntactic whitespace (combined with an intelligent compiler)
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.)
Yeah but Haskell is mostly used by mathematicians…
Not any language. I code professionally in F# which has semantic whitespace and it has literally never been an issue for me or my team. In contrast to Python, it’s a compiled language and the compiler is quite strict, so that probably helps.
As a serialization format, agree 100%, but would Python really be better if it switched to braces?
To be pedantic, 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.
If nothing else it enforces readable code which I think is a good thing.
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
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.
Compilation error or run time errors? One is a gift and the other is a curse.
PHP likes to have a word with you. (:
Like what?
Gonna whisper what the first word in “PHP” stands for
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.
They may be obvious to the reader but they may be impossible to see if tabs and spaces are mixed together.
Closing tokens are always clearer.
yes, from my other comment
the only mistake of Python when it comes to whitespaces was allowing hard tabs
but that’s easily fixed with an editor setting - on the other hand, unbalancing braces is too easy all the time.
That misleading behavior does happen in Python. The next programmer that comes along can’t tell if the original programmer fucked it up and didn’t unindent to put a statement outside of the block or if they meant to put it inside the block. I’ve debugged this one too many times and it takes hours each time because it’s impossible to see the bug at all!!
The misleading behavior is about what you expect to execute in the source code you’re looking at vs what’s actually executed.
What you describe is a logic ambiguity that can happen in any program / language.
I’m fine with python, because it’s consistent. In C I get nervous every time I see it.
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.
I think this is just familiarity. I never have issues with indentation, but when refactoring js I’m always like hey who’s fucking brace is this
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.
As someone who has been working in Python a ton for the last couple years, it’s amusing to me how many downvotes you’re getting for simply noting that good code style and tight, terse, modularized implementation of business logic more or less addresses the issue. Because it absolutely does in the vast majority of cases.
Or a sign you should get a bigger screen 😂 (j/k)
They hated him because he spoke the truth
People hate hearing that they are bad coders 😂
You and the other guy are saying to focus on writing code with less indentation and using smaller methods, and you both got downvoted.
I fully agree, small methods all the way, and when that’s not possible it’s time to refactor into possibility!
Can address it by writing code that doesn’t depend much on indentation, which also makes code more linear and easier to follow.
would Python really be better if it switched to braces?
Yes. A thousand times, yes.
