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?

  • @Vivendi@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    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

    • darki
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      3 months ago

      Can you stop hating on haters? Thanks 😄

    • Sir Gareth
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      113 months ago

      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.

      • @wewbull@feddit.uk
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        83 months ago

        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.

          • @wewbull@feddit.uk
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            33 months ago

            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.

      • @SandLight@lemmy.world
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        23 months ago

        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.

        • @FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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          23 months ago

          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.

    • @orcrist@lemm.ee
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      63 months ago

      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.

  • NaevaTheRat [she/her]
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • @FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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      73 months ago

      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.

      • NaevaTheRat [she/her]
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        33 months ago

        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?

        • @FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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          43 months ago

          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?

          • NaevaTheRat [she/her]
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            23 months ago

            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.

            • @ursakhiin@beehaw.org
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              13 months ago

              Different user here.

              My only criteria for a backend language is it tells me something went wrong and where. Hence my distaste for JS.

    • @MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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      203 months ago

      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.

    • @tibi@lemmy.world
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      73 months ago

      Sadly, unreadable on mobile. Text doesn’t word wrap, dragging to pan it is annoying and makes the keyboard show up.

  • @xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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    353 months ago

    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 .ini is probably “good enough”.

      • @gsfraley@lemmy.world
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        103 months ago

        Strong agree. It’s also the absolute best at expressing really long documents of configuration/data.

    • hallettj
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      3 months ago

      I agree - YAML is not suitable for complex cases that people use it in, like Terraform and 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 true and false, and it’s implicit quoting is a bit complex. So some values that you expect to be strings might be interpreted as something els.

      • @xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        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.

        • hallettj
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          13 months ago

          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.

        • hallettj
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          43 months ago

          Oh, thanks for calling that out. I think I may have mixed up some of the frustrations I experienced at an old job.

  • @gencha@lemm.ee
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    313 months ago

    Following along with the style of your own post: YAML doesn’t suck, because I feel so.

    Thanks for asking.

  • magic_lobster_party
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    273 months ago

    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.

    • lemmyng
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      273 months ago

      I will never forgive JSON for not allowing commas after the last element in a list.

    • @verstra@programming.dev
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      133 months ago

      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.

  • mox
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • 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.

  • @LyD@lemmy.ca
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    193 months ago

    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.

  • UnfortunateShort
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • @Reddfugee42@lemmy.world
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    183 months ago

    I don’t like a thing, fellas. With that being all I’ve told you, please explain why I don’t like that thing.

  • @lehenry@lemmy.world
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    183 months ago

    I think TOML should replace YAML for config files, it is much clearer, easier to parse for a human.

    • NostraDavid
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      23 months ago

      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.

  • It sucks the same way Python sucks. Some people just really don’t like indentation-based syntax. I’m one of them, so I dislike both formats. However, if you groove on that sort of thing, I don’t think YAML is any worse than any other markup.

    Oddly, I get along with Haskell, which also used indentation for scoping/delimiting; I can’t explain that, except that, somehow, indentation-based syntax seems to fit better with functional languages. But I have no clear argument about why; it’s just an oddity in my aesthetics.

    • Eager Eagle
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      3 months ago

      You can’t say python’s whitespace usage is as bad as yaml’s. YAML mixes 2 and 4 spaces all the time. Python scripts don’t run if you write this kind of crap.

      And whitespaces is really just the tip of the iceberg of YAML problems…

      • @atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        YAML mixes 2 and 4 spaces all the time. Python scripts don’t run if you write this kind of crap.

        Sure it does. You only need to be consistent within a block. Python’s syntax is ridiculous and solves problems that basically don’t exist.

        All of my java/kotlin/rust/etc. code is trivially well formatted and can be done by my editor. Moving code blocks is trivial. Refactoring is easier when I didn’t need to hand -format the code just to make it work.

        • Eager Eagle
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          3 months ago

          That’s part of the problem. Different number of whitespaces indicate different nesting levels and the YAML spec does not enforce them. These two horrible YAMLs are valid and are not equivalent:

          a:
           b:
               - c
               -  d
                - e
          f:
              "ghi"
          
          a:
           b:
               - c
               - d
               -  e
          f:
              "ghi"
          
          • So it’s easy to enforce locally but you don’t have to. And it’s easy to see indentation on modern IDEs and you can even make your indents rainbows and collapse structures to make it easier to see what’s going on, but I guess since some people want to write it in vi without ALE or a barebones text editor, it’s bad? Like there are legit reasons it’s bad, and other people have mentioned them throughout the thread, but this seems like a pretty easy thing to deal with. I work with ansible a bunch and YAML rarely is where my problem is.

            • @atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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              63 months ago

              Jesus, just what I want to do with the devops team - spend a few weeks standardizing on an editor and configuring them to edit yaml.

              • A few weeks? How do you stay employed? How do you even feed yourself at that pace? Blocked on making a sandwich, I’ve got the wrong type of bread.

                It’s three lines in an editor config file to standardize the indents across any editor: https://editorconfig.org/

                In vscode, adding two extensions is all I need:, yamllint (if you don’t use linters, I don’t know how you do your job in any language) and rainbow indents. Atom had similar ones. I’m sure all IDEs are capable of these things. If you work at a place that forces you to use a specific editor and limits the way you can use it, that’s not YAML’s fault.

                At a certain point, it’s your deficiencies that make a language difficult, not the language’s. Don’t blame your hammer when you haven’t heated the iron.