Hacker News Reader

Comment by dhzhzjsbevs | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand why people use toml. It's like someone said, man, yaml is great but it could be better and toml is the result.

Only yaml isn't great and toml is so much worse.

Sorry sounds off topic but the way you say it's "easy to configure" and include toml in the same sentence just gave me flashbacks to traefik.

Complicated toml is unreadable, if yaml isn't enough, you probably need json, not toml.

View on HN

Toml is not much more than a standardization of how to represent trees with INI. INI has been in use since at least the 90's and it persists because it is easy to read and edit, and supports comments.

I actually find traefik quite nice to configure vs. the old conf disaster of apache. I've configured it by hand and also generated config by scripts with ease.

If you want to complain about a design on HN the better way is to suggest a design you think is superior.

I thought I did? https://json5.org/

Parsing json as a human is unambiguous and simple.

Parsing yaml and toml is full of ambiguity and readability problems depending on where you're reading it.

The only people who think json is a bad format are the type of people that think semicolons are the problem. They're just not.

As someone who has negative feelings about YAML: I like TOML.

This is however besides the point. I hate any format if it is misused. TOML is great for config files up to a certain complexity. It is not great for configuration files that should be code. If you feel your configuration file could use a configuration file, you might be doing it wrong.

TOML to me is an successor to INI, with support for lists and other things that can be useful for typical configurations. I have never had any configuration-syntax related issue with any tool that used TOML for configuration — YAML on the other hand...

I'll take YAML/TOML over JSON any day.

shrug

People who chose JSON for configuration are not to be trusted.

Official, meaningful tooling for yaml also doesn't exist. Parsing and emitting yaml does nothing for anyone until you can actually extract structures from the format.

The full yaml standard is also full of features no one ever actually uses in practice, but if you don't implement it, you are thusly not compliant with the specification.

If you read it, you'd go, "Wow, you can do that?" and "That's bad that you can do that."

There is a parser and producer for yaml in all the major languages. I mean, even

    perl -MYAML -E 'say YAML::LoadFile("filename.yaml")->{foo}{bar}'

what level of tooling do you mean?

And by YAML, some libraries implement YAML 1.1, some others implement YAML 1.2, and by YAML 1.2 they actually mean YAML 1.2 core schema. And often they implement that poorly.

So it doesn't help that:

* there is YAML 1.1 and YAML 1.2, and you need to know which one you want to use

* there is this thing called "core schema" and it's possible to use other schemas, but nobody seems to care

* the spec itself is complex, and hard to implement well

https://github.com/mikefarah/yq

Traefik supports all three of those interchangeably.

So does Caddy (and more!) https://caddyserver.com/docs/config-adapters

Caddy is awesome. You are awesome and Matt is awesome. The community is awesome.

This is one of the greatest piece of software I ever used.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com