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Comment by tzcnt | Hacker News Reader

Developer ergonomics is drastically underappreciated, even in modern times. Since we're talking about textual data formats, I'll go out on a limb here and say that I hate YAML. Double checking exactly how many spaces are present on each line is tedious. It manages to make a simple task like copy-pasting something from a different file (at a different indentation level) into an error-prone process. I'll take angle brackets any day.

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You haven’t felt hate until you’ve counted spaces in your Helm templates in order to know what value to put after `nindent`. The punchline is that k8s doesn’t even speak yaml, the protocol is all json and it’s the tooling that inflicts yaml on us. I can live with yaml as a config format, but once logic starts creeping in, give me anything else.

Working with large YAML documents is incredibly annoying and shows the benefit of closing tags.

It all went downhill after we stopped using .ini files

Well....toml isn't that much more than .ini files slightly brough up in feature support.

Again not great for bigger documents.

JSON5 is a real sweet spot for me. Closing brackets, but I don't have to type every tag twice. Comments and trailing commas.

I find for deeply hierarchical data that XML is much easier to read.

Emacs has pretty print JSON which makes it very easy to read. I don't find it possible, XML displayed for human consumption to be better than that.

interrsting. I find the signal/noise ratio of XML really bad.

what I really dread in XML though is that XML only has idref/id standardized, and no path references. so without tool support you can't navigate to a reference target.

which turns XML into the "binary" format for GUI tools.

> so without tool support you can't navigate to a reference target

Maybe, but XML tools are also just superior to JSON counterparts. XPath is fantastic, and so is XSD and XSLT. I also quite like the integration with .NET.

My general experience with JSON as a configuration language has been sad. It's a step back from XML in a lot of ways.

yes, XML is very mature, and fun if you have access to advanced tools.

however most oss builds on libxml which is stuck in xslt 1 and xpath 2 iirc...

I recently stumbled upon James Clark's youngest brainchild the ballerina language.

https://ballerina.io/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_(programmer)#Caree...

> Developer ergonomics is drastically underappreciated, even in modern times.

When was the last time you had an editor that wouldn't just auto close the current tag with "</" ? I mean it's a god-send for knowing where you are at in large structure. You aren't scrolling to the top to find which tag you are in.

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