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Comment by HideousKojima | Hacker News Reader

What if I hate both formats? XML is overly verbose, while JSON isn't specific enough or precise enough for a lot of my needs.

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I just checked out the spec, and it gets pretty ugly in the Table section. A lot of the json examples are both shorter and IMO more precise. Stuff that’s not allowed with [table] is allowed with [[table]], and it’s confusing to understand what level of depth I’m at.

I’ll take edn over any of “em. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

Comments and time stamps allowed, arbitrary nesting of data structures, make your own tagged literals if you need them. And commas are whitespace, mostly unnecessary.

I've got yet another markup language for your hate group's target list :)

Come join the dark side where we enjoy the wonders of binary formats such as avro and protobuf.

I actually love binary formats, especially for network communication. We probably waste tons of processing power and network bandwidth needlessly sending JSON back and forth everywhere and re-deserializing it. I'm personally a fan of MessagePack.

Though for something where you want human readability it's hard to beat TOML in my opinion.

https://github.com/ron-rs/ron

Absolutely agree. TOML is far and away the best for config files.

You can't be serious; I can't stand having to guess what kind of crazy markup is required to express things in toml. As a concrete example I converted my local kubeconfig (which is yaml) and here are the completely random characters indicating some kind of hierarchy

    apiVersion = "v1"
    current-context = ""
    kind = "Config"

    [[clusters]]
    name = "my-cluster"

    [clusters.cluster]
    certificate-authority-data = "LS0tL..."
    server = "https://example.com"

    [[contexts]]
    name = "context0"

    [contexts.context]
    cluster = "my-cluster"
    user = "my-user"

    [[contexts]]
    name = "context1"

    [contexts.context]
    cluster = "my-cluster"
    user = "my-user"

    [[users]]
    name = "my-user"

    [users.user]
    [users.user.exec]
    apiVersion = "client.authentication.k8s.io/v1beta1"
    args = ["eks", "get-token"]
    command = "aws"

It is really just arrays of objects/dicts that get complicated with TOML. For dictionary properties not inside an array, you can either fully specify the path `foor.bar.baz = 7`, or use a header like `[foo.bar]` and specify `baz=7`.

Also if I was handwriting that I would probably make more use of doted property names implying dictionaries like so, which though it has a little bit more repetition in property names, seems easier to read:

    apiVersion = "v1"
    current-context = ""
    kind = "Config"

    [[clusters]]
    name = "my-cluster"
    cluster.certificate-authority-data = "LS0tL..."
    cluster.server = "https://example.com"

    [[contexts]]
    name = "context0"
    context.cluster = "my-cluster"
    context.user = "my-user"

    [[contexts]]
    name = "context1"
    context.cluster = "my-cluster"
    context.user = "my-user"

    [[users]]
    name = "my-user"
    user.exec.apiVersion = "client.authentication.k8s.io/v1beta1"
    user.exec.args = ["eks", "get-token"]
    user.exec.command = "aws"

If k8s was designed with TOML in mind, it probably have been structured differently, such that "Contexts" for example might be just a dictionary mapping names to an object that has the values from the "context" property (The existing pattern of an array of objects where each object has a name, but store most of their properties in a property whose name matches the object's type is already weird, but doesn't look terrible in yaml.)

Such a redesigned to be a more TOML friendly schema would then look like this:

    apiVersion = "v1"
    current-context = ""
    kind = "Config"

    [clusters.my-cluster]
    certificate-authority-data = "LS0tL..."
    server = "https://example.com"

    [contexts.context0]
    cluster = "my-cluster"
    user = "my-user"

    [contexts.context1]
    cluster = "my-cluster"
    user = "my-user"

    [users.my-user.exec]
    apiVersion = "client.authentication.k8s.io/v1beta1"
    args = ["eks", "get-token"]
    command = "aws"

As the other person who replied to you noted, a converted-from-yaml file wherein the service is designed to use yaml, not toml, it hardly a good example of toml. Of course your example is bad.

At least use a native toml file as an example.

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