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Comment by RockRobotRock | Hacker News Reader

It seems a little crazy that we have a TOML stdlib but not YAML. also TOML is ugly

I think TOML is a great format. Almost self documenting, easy to understand, less foot Gün’s for the uninitiated and the best is it’s based on INI format, but it’s smarter.

If you think you need to serialize something more complex, use XML. It might look ugly, but it’s very powerful, can be verified on many levels and has a mature ecosystem.

“Cooler” doesn’t always mean better, especially for bigger data. Neither YAML, nor JSON scales to that sizes while being readable and easy to maintain.

This. I've said it in one of the other threads re: YAML. TOML is great for simple user editable configs. Once you get into data exchange territory, use XML. Just the ability to define a schema and 'test' your XML document conforms is powerful and can tell you if something's wrong long before you end up with catastrophic failures.

So what if it's ugly? Is this a serialization format or paintbrush?

Also, I think TOML stdlib gets to the heart of what I've been arguing. People who like syntactic whitespace like YAML. Everyone else (like C devs) don't. It makes quite a bit of sense to me that C devs don't want to touch YAML with a 10-ft pole.

It's not just aesthetically ugly — including the entire path to every item is just a lot. It's the opposite of DRY.

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