Hacker News Reader

Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

YAML is an amazing config language for simple to mildly complex configs. It's easier to read and write than JSON, and it only really breaks apart when you're heavily deviating from nested lists/dictionaries with string values. People use it everywhere because by the time it becomes painful you're already so invested it's not really worth the hassle of switching.

View on HN

It’s aesthetically pleasing for simple configs. I’m so used to writing JSON by hand by now I don’t find it much easier. At least I never have to think about how a value is going to be interpreted from a JSON since it has a decent subset of types and I can visually tell what it is

I, on the other hand, find it much harder to read and write even in very simple configs. I never know what the indent is supposed to be, I just press my spacebar until my editor stops complaining. I find it really hard to tell if a line is a new entry or a subset of the parent entry.

I'm sure if I used it more it'd become easier, but my whole team doesn't understand it either. Luckily we only need it for GitHub configurations.

YAML is (vaguely) a superset of JSON, so you can just use JSON (without tabs) and get your life back.

I don’t need a config language with no fewer that 6 subtly different ways of decoding a string to remember, and certainly not one with a spec longer than C’s. Compare to JSON’s, which (famously) fits on a postcard.

https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

https://yaml-multiline.info/

https://www.json.org/json-en.html

Until you find a snippet of config you want to copy into your `application.yml` in Spring or Quarkus (Java frameworks). If it doesn't paste in cleanly (and it rarely ever does) you'll need to go research the schema and find out where to put things. Meanwhile, if you're using a normal `application.properties` file, after you've finished pasting, you can go on with your life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com