this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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YAML is the Excel of data formats due to the Norway Problem
OK, that's excessively "convenient" for booleans. But I don't get the passionate YAML hate, seems like a simple enough language for config. Didn't have the pleasure ("pleasure"?) to work with it though, so what's why else is it shitty?
A property can have the wrong indentation and it would still be a syntactically correct yaml. It’s hard to distinguish whether a line is wrongly indented or not. Copy and paste a line and mistakenly use the wrong indentation, and the entire production breaks.
In json it’s much harder to do similar mistakes.
I think TOML found a pleasant compromise there
That’s very much not my experience. I use YAML regularly and while I’ve had copy paste indentation errors when I look at the offending line it’s always obvious to me how to fix the indentation. The only indentation thing that’s ever given me trouble is embedding YAML as a string within a file that uses tabs.
Do a search for 'why yaml is bad' and you'll get a lot of stories.
Constant passing problems, especially when the yaml gets very large and complex. After I implemented a new feature I was pulled into a call with 12-15 people demanding to know why it didn't work. The new feature worked fine, The guys yaml had the wrong amount of white space and so it didn't parse.
White space in the wrong place? Fails Wrong amount of tabs? Fail
Working in a big configuration file that has a lot of nesting? Good luck.
Best part is that most of these things don't throw errors or anything, it just doesn't work and you are left scratching your head as to why your deploy only fails in the production environment.
since yaml is just a superset of json, you can easily avoid all problems like this
yaml is like a less strict json for me