Programming

17423 readers

26 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

Why YAML sucks? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by heikkiket@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

144 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I agree - YAML is not suitable for complex cases that people use 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 true and false, and it's implicit quoting is a bit complex. So some values that you expect to be strings might be interpreted as something els.

[–] EvenOdds@lemm.ee 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What YAML does Terraform use? HCL is similar but different enough to YAML.

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh, thanks for calling that out. I think I may have mixed up some of the frustrations I experienced at an old job.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Maybe you're thinking of Ansible?

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes, there's a good example. Ansible would make more sense if its configuration language was Nix...

[–] fossphi@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago

But if one is already using nix, then just use nix

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 1 points 2 months ago

I think it depends. Lua is great for scripting - like when X happens do Y. I agree that makes sense for a case like Home Assistant. Sometimes you really want the result to be a data structure, not an interactive program, in which case I think more sophisticated configuration (as opposed to scripting) languages might be better.