Comment by throwaway81523 21 hours ago
Oh yay, just what we need, ANOTHER one of these. Did the YA in YAML not already give a clue? Now there are 15 competing standards. Please make it stop. S-expressions were all that we wanted in the first place.
Yaml has terrible footguns. I'd rather we keep experimenting and find a new optimum.
Toml fixes some issues with shallow Yaml, but sucks at deeply nested data.
Maml looks nice at cursory glance. It seems to do nesting, numerics, comments, and strings right.
We're really close to having a great format. I'd like to see more attempts before accepting what we have as permanent.
If you are writing a software system that needs potentially human edited config files, yaml is the best for human edited files if you, software architect, use a footgun less parser.
Yaml is popular like python because indentation as a scope depth indicator is far more visually intuitive for low skill programmers than braces (c,json) or counting/matching parents in lisp or begin end tags in xml.
Sorry your kubernetes ecosystem didn't do that. Why not get them to change parsers? A hell of a lot easier than changing k8s to toml or maml.
Because ultimately that's what the frustration of yaml comes from, right? Kubernetes config?
> S-expressions were all that we wanted in the first place.
There are dozens of us!
According to wikipedia “There are many variants of the S-expression format, supporting a variety of different syntaxes for different datatypes.”
Using parentheses instead of curly braces is fine by me, but it doesnt seem to solve the issue of syntax bikeshedding.
The fundamental problem is “configuration” is a huge area, from simple key-value lists to complex declarative languages. And you want the format to be both easy to read and edit for humans and simple to parse and process for computers. No single format will be perfect for all use cases, but perhaps a compromise can be found which is good enough for most cases.