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Comment by CipherThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

This feels tangential to the article. The article doesn't situate YAML against XML, JSON, TOML etc but against general purpose languages. The differences between the configuration approach and the GPL approach are pretty substantial compared to the differences between individual config formats.

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To me that is the axis of discontent though.

To me the badness is something like:

- just want a static unconditional config -> YAML

- ah but I want to pass around some variables -> YAML with some custom syntax for vars

- ah but I want conditionals based on system properties -> ...

And you end up with an awkward programming language with YAML syntax. I don’t much care if it’s XML or JSON at this stage, I just don’t want to write programs this way.

I am very confused by everyone abusing YAML for weird crap. For me YAML is just an alternative to writing an application.properties file (in Spring or Micronaut).

Yes I do use environment variables for secrets/passwords but that is about it.

Yeah, I think 99% of the real-world usage of YAML would trivially convert to JSON. Just static data.

If you need weird complex stuff, use a real scripting language like Lua or something. It should be faster than a YAML parser, at least.

#2 onwarda means you need an API or a library or something. Unfortuntely many app creators dont recognize when their app has passed to stage #2 so we get all these unholy hacks.

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