- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
YAML is never appropriate. XML is also never appropriate.
There might be some fine parts of XML. If somebody made a subset of XML with just the good parts, I might be convinced that was a fine and decent thing that was “sometimes appropriate.” But XML is more than just angle brackets and forward slashes. With namespaces and XSL and XPath and DTDs and schemas and entities, it’s a Lovecraftian mess of madess from which death is the only respite.
Hahaha no it’s fine I’ll just slap together some regex to parse what I want out of it, what’s the worst that could happen
The horror!!
I’m considering making another account to upvote you again
Everything is better than yaml. Even toml is better than yaml. I should start writing web services that only speak toml. I’ll call it inter net Ini: Inini
Most of the time I find people’s arguments against yaml to be overly nitpicky, and this is no exception. “there is no time when yaml is appropriate”? Give me a break. It’s perfectly fine. I’ve been using it for 15 years and the worst things that ever happened to me was “the Norway problem” (bare string
no
is interpreted as boolean valuefalse
), and a number with a leading 0 bring interpreted as octal. And those happened to me exactly once, I learned something, and I continued on with my day.I do agree with the author’s mention of json as a lowest-common-denominator interchange language though. Especially when it helps to sidestep these format holy wars. Let me have my yaml and you can have your ugly-ass toml or json5 or whatever other “improved” config language someone tries next