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?
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Any language in which whitespace has syntactic value is intrinsically flawed.
Can’t speak to your specific issues, but that’s why yaml will always suck.
YAML sucks because, among other things, indenting it is not obvious.
In contrast, the only mistake of Python when it comes to whitespaces was allowing hard tabs, which makes it too easy to mix them if your editor is not configured.
Improper indentation stands out more than missing or unbalanced braces and it’s really not an issue to delimit code blocks.
Hard tabs are the only accessible option though. If you care about developers with a different vision capability than yours, the only correct indentation choice is tabs.
If, because of bad vision, someone needs to crank the font size way up, it’s very possible that they might need to work with a tabstop of 3, 2, or even just 1 space.
With tabs, this is user configurable. With spaces it isn’t.
In any modern editor it is configurable with spaces too
What “it” is configurable? If the code is indented with 4 spaces, it is indented with 4 spaces. You can configure your editor to indent with 1 space if you want, but then your code is not going to respect the 4 spaces of indentation used by the rest of the code.
I repeat, the only accessible indentation option is using tabs. This is not an opinion because every other option forces extra painful steps for those with vision issues (including, but not limited to, having to reformat the source files to tabs so they can work on them and then reformat them back to using spaces in order to commit them)
Haskell supports both semantic whitespace and explicit delimiters, and somehow almost everybody that uses the language disagrees with you.
But anyway, for all the problems of YAML, this one isn’t even relevant enough to point out. Even if you agree it’s a problem. (And I agree that the YAML semantic whitespace is horrible.) If YAML was a much better language, it would be worth arguing whether semantic whitespace breaks it or not.
Yeah but Haskell is mostly used by mathematicians…
It’s the only time that tabs Vs spaces really riles me up. So annoying when everyone has different tab lengths
Not any language. I code professionally in F# which has semantic whitespace and it has literally never been an issue for me or my team. In contrast to Python, it’s a compiled language and the compiler is quite strict, so that probably helps.
Can people stop hating on shit?
FOR FUCKS SAKE, negative reinforcement dopamine has RUINED THE FUCKING NET.
EVERYWHERE I GO there’s someone bitching about something, hate circlejerks are unbelievably popular, people just love to hate on stuff.
You’re ruining your thought patterns with all these social media negativity bullshit.
Fucking TOML users hate on fucking YAML fucking C++ users hate Rust fucking Rust users hate literally everything under the sun and are insufferable to work with
EVERYONE, fucking CHILL
Can you stop hating on haters? Thanks 😄
stop hating on rust devs
Yeah TBH I like yaml. Sure its not the best ever, but its not the worst it could possibly be.
For config its not terrible. For ansible playbooks its again… not terrible.
Why is everyone always hating on something which is just kinda mid.
Config is fine, but Yamls biggest problem is people use it to describe programs. For example: playbooks. For example: CI steps.
If YAML wasn’t abused in this way it would have a lot less hate.
What’s wrong with using YAML for CI? I mean, I use it for Gitlab CI, the underlying script it runs is just Bash.
Right, so you just have a single step and then hand over to a proper script. I’ve seen many people try to put much more complex logic in there before handing over to a proper language.
You’re doing it right by avoiding as much of Gitlab’s CI features. I’ve seen versions where scripts are inlined in the YAML with expressions in random rule fields and pipeline variables thrown all over the place. And don’t get me started on their “includes” keyword, it’s awful in practice, gives me nightmares.
Then I write a Kubernetes manifest in YAML with JSON schema validation and the heart rate goes down again.
I dream of a life where I use YAML but all my configs are stuck in XML. People can complain but there’s always worse options.
One nice thing about XML is that there’s an official way to link to the schema from within the document. If you do that you can easily automatically validate it, and even better you get fantastic IDE support via Red Hat’s LSP server. Live validation, hover for keys, etc.
It’s a really nice experience and JSON schema can’t really match it.
That said, XML just has the wrong data model for 99% of use cases.
No seeds no stems no stress my guy. The Internet is a great place for complaining. Readers can downvote and move on, everyone gets what they want.
Programmers hate everything. You could design a spec which serenades you with angel song and feeds you chocolate dipped grapes and someone would be like: This is awful, my usecase is being a dog.
Sure there aren’t many things that are universally loved. I mean I can’t really think of anything that doesn’t have some flaw.
But that doesn’t mean everything is equal! What would you rather program with, Visual Basic or Go? PHP or Typescript? If you polled people there are obvious winners.
Hey would you rather build from wood or steel?
What glue is better: 2 part epoxy or PVA?
Do you prefer soap or bleach as cleaning agent?
Would you rather build from wood or tissue paper?
What glue is better: 2 part epoxy or pritt stick?
Do you prefer soap or ash as a cleaning agent?
Unlike tissue paper yaml is actually fit for purpose. I actually don’t know of any lang that literally can’t run a program. The most you could stretch what you’re saying to is that some esolangs are akin to making bricks of packed tissues to build with. They are art projects not serious submissions though.
I don’t like js as much as anyone else but as evidenced by reality it works. Programmers need to stop sniffing their own farts, you have such strong opinions about the most insane shit when at most you should be talking about narrower scopes for use and trade offs.
Different user here.
My only criteria for a backend language is it tells me something went wrong and where. Hence my distaste for JS.
This comment is underrated, even if it rises to the top of all comments.
Pleased to have touched your life with levity, stranger.
I write my specs in C++
That is amazing.
I don’t know what I just read.
If my website ever gets married, I’m going to invite this website to stand next to it as a bridesmaid - because it makes my website look pretty by comparison.
Sadly, unreadable on mobile. Text doesn’t word wrap, dragging to pan it is annoying and makes the keyboard show up.
Most of the stuff here can be avoided by using quotes for strings…
Because people over use it. YAML is pretty good for short config files that need to be human readable but it falls apart with complex multi line strings and escaping.
I think there are much better clearly delimited for machine reading purposes formats out there that you should prefer if you’re writing a really heavy config file and, tbh, I think for everything else
.iniis probably “good enough”.At least use TOML if you like ini, there is no ini spec but TOML can look quite similar.
Strong agree. It’s also the absolute best at expressing really long documents of configuration/data.
I agree - YAML is not suitable for complex cases that people use it in, like
Terraformand 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
trueandfalse, and it’s implicit quoting is a bit complex. So some values that you expect to be strings might be interpreted as something els.What YAML does Terraform use? HCL is similar but different enough to YAML.
Oh, thanks for calling that out. I think I may have mixed up some of the frustrations I experienced at an old job.
Maybe you’re thinking of Ansible?
Yes, there’s a good example. Ansible would make more sense if its configuration language was Nix…
But if one is already using nix, then just use nix
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.
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.
Following along with the style of your own post: YAML doesn’t suck, because I feel so.
Thanks for asking.
One pattern I’ve noticed is people seeking a language that’s better than {JSON,XML,INI,etc} at wrangling their slightly complex configuration files, noticing the additional features and type support offered by YAML, and assuming it will be a good solution.
Then, as their configs grow ever larger and more complex, they discover that expressing them in YAML requires large sections of deep nesting, long item sequences, and line wrapping. The syntax style that they saw working well in other places (e.g. certain programming languages) breaks down quickly at that level of complexity, making it difficult for humans to correctly write and follow, and leading to frequent errors.
YAML doesn’t suck for small stuff, IMHO. (But it is more complex than necessary for small stuff.)
For things likely to grow to medium-large size or complexity, I would recommend either breaking up the data into separate files, or looking for a different config/serialization language.
I don’t like YAML because it’s overly complicated. The specification is like 80 pages long. How the hell did they think that was a good idea?
JSON on the other hand is super simple. It doesn’t do more than it needs to.
Just compare this: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/
With this: https://www.json.org/json-en.html
The entire JSON specification is shorter than just the table of contents of the YAML specification!
Another thing I like about JSON is that you can format it however you want with the whitespace. Want everything on one line? Just write everything on one line!
If data can be represented as a JSON, then there’s generally only one way to represent it in JSON (apart from whitespace). In YAML the same data can be represented in 1000s of different ways. You pick one.
I will never forgive JSON for not allowing commas after the last element in a list.
That lack of trailing comma has been the bane of my existence.
This is the major reason for me. I really liked yaml, because it is way more readable to me than JSON. But then I kept finding new and more confusing yaml features and have realized how over-engineered it is.
Yaml would be great language if it had its features prunned heavy.
To paraphrase: There are two kinds of markup languages. Those that people complain about and those that nobody uses.
There is no silver bullet that will work perfectly for all use cases and we also don’t want to use 100 different tools. So people use things that aren’t perfect. But they’re good enough. I don’t think YAML is perfect and I still use it, because people know it and there are tons of tools already available.
But it’s not a markup language… It’s for data serialisation…
I remember the time when YAML meant Yet Another Markup Language.
I think TOML should replace YAML for config files, it is much clearer, easier to parse for a human.
Depends on the data structure. If you want to save a table of sorts, you’re getting a bunch of unreadable [[[]]] nonsense.
For flat structures it’s great though.
YAML works great for small config files, or situations where your configuration is fully declarative. Go look at the Kubernetes API with its resources.
People think YAML sucks because everyone loves creating spaghetti config/templates with it.
One reason it tends to become an absolute unholy mess is because people work around the declarative nature of those APIs by shoving imperative code into it. Think complicated Helm charts with little snippets of logic and code all over the place. It just isn’t really made for doing that.
It also forces your brain to switch back and forth between the two different paradigms. It doesn’t just become hard to read, it becomes hard to reason about.
I don’t like a thing, fellas. With that being all I’ve told you, please explain why I don’t like that thing.
Tons of people making Python comparisons regarding indentation here. I disagree. If you make an indentation error in Python, you will usually notice it right away. On the one hand because the logic is off or you’re referencing stuff that’s not in scope, on the other because if you are a sane person, you use a formatter and a linter when writing code.
The places you can make these error are also very limited. At most at the very beginning and very end of a block. I can remember a single indentation error I only caught during debugging and that’s it. 99% of the time your linter will catch them.
YAML is much worse in that regard, because you are not programming, you are structuring data. There is a high chance nothing will immediately go wrong. Items have default values, high-level languages might hide mistakes, badly trained programmers might be quick to cast stuff and don’t question it, and most of the time tools can’t help you either, because they cannot know you meant to create a different structure.
That said, while I much prefer TOML for being significantly simpler, I can’t say YAML doesn’t get the job done. It’s also very readable as long as you don’t go crazy with nesting. What’s annoying about it is the amount of very subtle mistakes it allows you to make. I get super anxious when writing YAML.
I didn’t use yaml much while it was gaining popularity, and therefore didn’t pay much attention. But this article really made me pay attention and now I distrust anything that uses yaml in any capacity.
https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell
Great link.
