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Comment by ahmedfromtunis | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious: on average, how many hours does one typically spend directly interacting with YAML on a *yearly* basis?

I'm not sure my experience is typical, but the creator of this page probably spent more time dealing with YAML building said page more than I spent working with YAML for MY ENTIRE LIFE.

I get it, the language has its flows, and they are apparent even with my limited exposure to it, but I don't think YAML would constitute the major part of anybody's workday. People probably spend more time and energy hating on YAML than actually working with it.

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If you deal with the platform side of things with the popular products your life is YAML.

Kubernetes definitions, Helm, Ansible, a lot of popular CI tools use it.

You would be very surprised. Infra people can very easily spend the vast majority of their (non-ops) time in the REPL from hell, manually editing static configuration files, visually inspecting (because there is rarely any local let alone static validation), pushing, waiting for minutes, and then trying again.

As an infra team we had this same problem. We also had a lot of different configuration types that were required for each tool, often several types being mixed within the same repo. After a couple of issues with syntax errors making it further down the release than we would have liked we ended up building a single tool to validate all of our configs rather than using a bunch of separate tools. We added it as a quality gate in our pipelines which really helped. We open-sourced it for anyone else going through the same issue: https://github.com/Boeing/config-file-validator. It's written in go and runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

I think that's precisely the problem with YAML. By being so unpredictable, it turns from "format I use without thinking much about" into "format that makes me spend a lot of time finding out what's wrong this time".

Maybe you and I haven't been bitten personally by YAML idiosincracies yet, but just learning about examples like the "Norway problem" and the "negative GPS coordinates bug"—and thinking how frustrating must have been to figure those out in the first place—makes me shudder.

Not too many hours in the grand scheme of things, I guess, but I spend more time than I'd like mucking about with package.json files (JSON) and GitHub Actions workflows (YAML). The JSON files feel vastly less painful.

Ansible.

Kubernetes stuff.

Many, many other CI/CD tools.

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