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?
Following along with the style of your own post: YAML doesn’t suck, because I feel so.
Thanks for asking.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
As a serialization format, agree 100%, but would Python really be better if it switched to braces?
Yes, I think so. The downside with Python comes when refactoring the code. There’s always this double checking if the code is correctly indented after the refactor. Sometimes small mistakes creep in.
It’s really hard to tell when Python code is incorrectly indented. It’s often still valid Python code, but you can’t tell if it’s wrong unless you know the intention of the code.
In order languages it’s always obvious when code is incorrectly indented. There’s no ambiguity.
It’s only hard to tell indentation in Python when the code block gets longer than about a screen, which is usually a sign the code should be refactored into smaller methods.
They hated him because he spoke the truth
As someone who has been working in Python a ton for the last couple years, it’s amusing to me how many downvotes you’re getting for simply noting that good code style and tight, terse, modularized implementation of business logic more or less addresses the issue. Because it absolutely does in the vast majority of cases.
People hate hearing that they are bad coders 😂
You and the other guy are saying to focus on writing code with less indentation and using smaller methods, and you both got downvoted.
I fully agree, small methods all the way, and when that’s not possible it’s time to refactor into possibility!
Or a sign you should get a bigger screen 😂 (j/k)
I think this is just familiarity. I never have issues with indentation, but when refactoring js I’m always like hey who’s fucking brace is this
Can address it by writing code that doesn’t depend much on indentation, which also makes code more linear and easier to follow.
Yes it would - look at optional braces for short if expressions in C family languages and why it’s so discouraged in large projects. Terminating characters are absolutely worth the cost of an extra LoC
I started in C before moving on to C++, Java, Ruby and Python.
I’ve had more bugs from missing braces than from misaligned whitespace because the latter is far more obvious when looking at a block of code.
Compilation error or run time errors? One is a gift and the other is a curse.
PHP likes to have a word with you. (:
Like what?
Gonna whisper what the first word in “PHP” stands for
False dichotomy. Optional braces are bad practice because they mislead the programmer that is adding an additional clause to the block.
This misleading behavior wouldn’t happen in Python, as it would either be invalid syntax, or it would be part of the block.
Indentation problems are pretty obvious to the reader. Even more than missing or unbalanced braces.
That misleading behavior does happen in Python. The next programmer that comes along can’t tell if the original programmer fucked it up and didn’t unindent to put a statement outside of the block or if they meant to put it inside the block. I’ve debugged this one too many times and it takes hours each time because it’s impossible to see the bug at all!!
The misleading behavior is about what you expect to execute in the source code you’re looking at vs what’s actually executed.
What you describe is a logic ambiguity that can happen in any program / language.
I don’t agree. It’s a direct result of whitespace, which does not happen if you don’t use whitespace. For example it can happen in Java and kotlin, but only if you use if statements without braces, which you pretty much never see. If you do see it you know to look out for the exact issue I described. That’s not possible in Python, since there is no alternative.
They may be obvious to the reader but they may be impossible to see if tabs and spaces are mixed together.
Closing tokens are always clearer.
would Python really be better if it switched to braces?
Yes. A thousand times, yes.
To be pendantic, it’s level of indentation in Python that has semantic meaning, not whitespace.
The end of line also has semantic meaning. Both indentation and eol are whitespace.
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.
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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)
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.
I now use Scala 3, and very happy with syntactic whitespace (combined with an intelligent compiler)
YAML had comments and trailing commas, therefore it’s objectively better than JSON. If you want a compromise solution that mostly looks like JSON, try JSON5.
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 used to think json was the best until I found json lines or line delimited json. Thank me later. I use it all the time. You can append until you’re blue in the face. It’s great for log files. Each line is a valid json file.
We all know it sucks. I have no idea why people use it instead of anything else. My workday is jammed with fucking ansible which, while also being so ghetto that we were easily doing more with less in 2002, uses So.much.fucking.yaml . Just when you think ansible couldn’t get more clunky and useless and slow, it also is configured in yaml.
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 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.
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…
I hated yaml with every fiber of my being when first had to use it, but I really wanted to use HomeAssistant and see what I could do with it. I hated it a bit less when I started using docker compose. I started loving it when I started using it as a way to explain json to non-programming IT types, trying to explain it without braces and brackets seems to get across easier. I guess its more human readable, but as a result formatting has to be spot on (those indents and spaces replace the need for brackets and braces).
One useful trick if you truly hate it but need it, write it in json, then just use a converter to change that into yaml.
Fun fact, since YAML is a superset of JSON, any JSON is a valid YAML. You can still use pure JSON.
White space/indentation as a construct of the syntax.
It’s why I have a hard time with python.
People have their likes and dislikes. Nothing wrong with that.
