I tell people I’m a software engineer but in reality I’m a config file engineer
Senior YAML programmer
Careers Fair; 2024
Teen: “Excuse me; how do I become a Tech Lead like you someday” Lead: “By simple luck of the draw I am the best at googling other people’s solutions to my team’s YAML config issues.”
Eh. Software is just data too. It’s about solving problems with systems using those systems and other systems and that’s software engineering. It’s recursive and wherever you are in the stack you’re standing on the shoulders of giants, and you’re still doing engineering. 💪
I am working on nand2tetris right now and learning about all the layers of abstraction is just terrific.
Did you know YAML is a recursive acronym? It stands for ‘YAML AML MAML LAML’
Nature is beautiful❤️
Is it polynomially recursive? Like, the AML stands for “AML MAML LAML”, and so on?
YAML would such a nice language for config files but then it turns out that “no” is falsy and so a list of Scandinavian countries turns from
- se
- fi
- no
into
- “se”
- “fi”
- False
I wish there was like a JSON5 equivalent for YAML that just reduces its scope lol
(and no, TOML also looks ugly :P)Norway is false and Finland isn’t in Scandinavia
S W E D E N
S W E D E N
S W E D E N
This is definitely a failing of yaml. Though, I feel that generally it’s the sort of thing you learn once the hard way, then it sticks with you pretty well.
Also I’m glad there are more anti-toml folks are out there, feels like I’m taking crazy pills when people say it is “simple” and “elegant”. IMO it’s uglier than old-school ini format - at least it’s more strictly defined but that doesn’t really sway me to convert
Which is better for structured data?
- elegant, human readable, indentation sensitive language that’s great for deep nesting but has some weird idiosyncrasies with some dynamically typed parsers being too smart for their own good
- glorified ini
The choice is clear
TOML isn’t elegant at all but damn, it is really simple.
If by simple you mean “can’t count from 1 to 10 in a loop” and by elegant you mean “easier to understand than a one line perl script” then sure…
You’re looking for StrictYaml
Looks interesting, I’ll check it out, thanks :D
Ansible go brrrr
… slowly.
And yet its faster, easier and more reliable in setting up and maintaining complex cluster software.
You know, at this point I’ve been writing YAML on and off for a while now. You’d think I actually understand the syntax by now, but I don’t.
That’s because it is absolutely terrible. It is the first serious/real “language” I have encountered since Cobol where indent level has functional meaning. This is not good company to be in.
Could’ve been worse. Could be unprettified json.
Json is incredibly easy to prettify.
I do it by converting to yaml ;)
I wrote a json prettifier a couple months ago with just a couple lines of code. I thought it would take a while but ended up taking like 10 minutes.
js’s
JSON.stringify(obj, null, 2);Import json Import pprint?
| jq
| jqI use jq pretty much every day
Me carrying a comically oversized box of compose files.
Fucking hate YAML. With every fibre of my being. YAML needs tO GTFO
Nix
Nothing
My fatass read a box of donuts
I didn’t know that ansible-galaxy had a comic
In typical ansible fashion, expect it in 20 years.
deleted by creator
Those devops should switch to nix already 😁
A fun YAML fact is that it’s a superset of JSON. All JSON is valid YAML.
Not sure, how much fun there is in that fact
