• dan@upvote.au
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    1 year ago

    Friendly reminder if you prefer dealing with JSON - YAML is a superset of JSON, so any valid JSON is also valid YAML.

    • magic_lobster_party@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      That’s more of a weakness of yaml. There’s so many ways to specify the exact same thing. Not exactly what you need for configuration files maintained by multiple people. It easily becomes an big incoherent mess.

      In JSON the default way is the only way. Nice and coherent.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        1 year ago

        I agree that YAML is painful and it really seems like it’s had a lot of feature creep.

        JSON is painful in its own way too, though. There’s a lot of syntax noise from things like braces, quotation marks, etc, so it’s easy to make a mistake. Regular JSON doesn’t allow trailing commas.

        YAML tried to solve some of that, and did succeed in some ways, but introduced its own issues.

        TOML seems great to me, but maybe it has its own issues. TOML actually has defined data formats for things like dates (both offset and local) and times, which is missing from both JSON and YAML so every app ends up doing it its own way.

        • XTornado@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          One big thing of JSON I hate is that sometimes is used for config files or similar and it doesn’t supports comments which sucks.

          • rambaroo@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            JSONC does support comments but it wouldn’t be interoperable with anything expecting pure JSON. But still useful for local configs.

    • Terrasque@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      Found out the hard way that no, it’s not… there are a few valid json files that most yaml parsers choke on

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yes, a bit. But that’s not the problem.

      The problem is that the current fashion of devops is done through piles and piles of badly defined YAML. If it used any other configuration language, it would be just as bad.

      • Michal@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        How’s it annoying? It’s easier to edit by hand than json as it allows for comments and there’s no trailing comma errors. I prefer it any day over json.

    • MagicShel@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      There are plugins that go back and forth between JSON and YAML so as you might expect it’s similar. Unlike JSON, spacing has semantic meaning, which can be a little annoying, especially when cutting and pasting. It’s nice in that configs aren’t cluttered up with open and close braces. It could be annoying AF if you’re a tabs instead of spaces person but idk because I’m a spaces person.

      I like YAML for config over .config files but it’s not a big deal either way. It just encourages better organization of settings because the hierarchical structure demands it while .config let’s you just drop a setting anywhere in the file. But it’s valid to have the opposite preference for the exact same reasons.

    • unalivejoy@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I’ll answer your question with a question. Why does YAML support sexagesimal? (that’s base 60)

      ports:
      - 22:22
      

      Becomes

      {
        "ports": [1342]
      }
    • Tuna Casserole@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      not at all. it’s used for configuration and stuff. having a lot of it can be a real bummer depending on the context. like a puppet config or perhaps a super weird docker compose setup. I’ve never heard anyone complain about the markup though. it’s like blaming json for a crap api or something or idk blaming the coffee cup for burnt coffee 🤷

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s just another structured data format. It’s used for a lot more than config. It’s also how you define commands and etc for Ansible. Like how a Maven project is defined in XML or a NodeJS package has its JSON.

        Sure they’re still “just” data formats on their own, but what they’re used for is genuinely just as important as what it is. I really doubt XML would’ve held on like it has without HTML being the web.

    • learningduck@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      I learned the hard way that no is false in yaml. Took us a while to realize why our app failed to start in Norway. Too many ways to do something.