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Comment by neallindsay | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, yaml is JSON that allows comments (and a bunch of other syntax).

And is so pedantic about whitespace that you need to specifically configure your editor to be able to retain your sanity while editing it, no thanks.

Significant whitespace owes me many days of my life.

What? Just write it in JSON format.

That is _possible_, but in the real world if your team has chosen YAML, it’s not because they want to write more reasonable JSON. They want to write YAML.

Using YAML will make you a more spiritually advanced being because every time you copy and paste content into a yaml document it requires a prayer.

I want to blow my brains out every time there is a mysterious tab indent in my file

I used to do this frequently. Take a JSON file, add comments, and parse it as YAML.

Then I discovered a handful of YAML parsers in various languages support code execution on parsing. Which basically killed YAML for me.

It's definitely no good for JSON that you don't write yourself. But that's not the JSON that you want to write comments into.

I appreciate that Python makes you choose between a “full” parser and a safe one.

Just say no to yaml

I like yaml, easily readable by computers as well as humans (without any coding experience even). I don’t see the problem with it.

> easily readable by computers

Have you ever written or tried to write a YAML parser?

It's already done, so no need.

I will forever be aware of the pain of the developers of pyaml whenever I `import yaml` from now on. And even more grateful too.

It's actually not easy for computers to read YAML. It's very difficult, especially when compared to JSON.

My computer has little problems with it!

Ok, we're being pedantic, perhaps it depends on how much information you put in a Yaml file, I usually see it used for small config files.

And ambiguity. It's too far in the other direction IMO.

Tell that to the Norwegians!

yaml is a superset of JSON, which means that any parser that expect yaml will happily consume JSON!

Also JSON + comment that's JSON5.

At least in Python, YAML parsers are orders of magnitude slower than JSON parsers.

I switched out my app config to YAML which parses much slower and now my app starts exactly as fast as before.

I don’t think anyone proposes switching to YAML for your API endpoints

If you have 1000s of lines of yaml you're restarts will be delayed by multiple seconds. So YMMV.

I mean I can imagine such a slow yaml parser but have never experienced it

TOML is one-to-one with JSON, except allow comments.

I like JSON lines format where I can strip comment lines out.

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