My spicy take is that XML is better than YAML, because there are situations where XML is appropriate, but there’s no situation where YAML is appropriate. Let me explain…
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 value false), 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
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