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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • That’s a valid point.

    There are two kinds of good serialization languages, the ones where values are black boxes and only serialize the data structure, and the ones where everything is completely determined and can be turned directly into an API.

    JSON is neither, but it’s closer to the first than YAML. XML is the first, while the SOAP standard almost turns it into the second. TOML is about as close to the first as JSON.




  • 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.






  • Ouch.

    I’ve once decided that “hey, software interaction is logic, so prolog should be the best for complex protocols and UIs!”

    Quite soon I understood that no, “complex protocols and UIs” are a problem all by themselves, enabling them makes them worse, and enabling them with prolog makes them even worse.

    Up to this day I’m stuck trying to make data quering more “programming-like” than the restrictive thing we have with SQL. I’ve backtracked a few times already after noticing that I just designed prolog again.

    But fear not, at some point one of us will finally find that problem domain for what prolog is really suitable. I know of an entire company betting on using it for describing access control rules, maybe they are up to something!