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Comment by phanimahesh | Hacker News Reader

This. So true. Yaml has always been an overly complicated format, with weird quirks ( like norway becoming false in a list of country codes ).

I find it an absolute shame that languages like Dhall did not become more popular earlier. Now everything in devops is yaml, and I think many developers pick yaml configs not out of good reasons but defaulting to its ubiquity as sufficient.

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>norway

yaml 1.2 was released in 2009, and it fixed this problem. this is an implementation issue.

https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/#12-yaml-history

If your data format is so complicated that all commonly used implementations are not compliant with your spec, maybe it's a problem with the data-format.

Every single implementation people actually use seems to be a messy mix of yaml 1.1 and 1.2....

Maybe if the yaml project wants to consider this fixed, they should have written some correct reference parsers themselves for any languages in need, and encouraged their use.

I noted this in reply to the comment above, but: the YAML 1.2 spec doesn't actually mandate that parsers use the Core Schema. They left it as a recommendation. So I don't consider it to be "fixed" at all.

I would not say it "fixed" the problem. It removed the _recommendation_ for parser implementations to use the regex `y|Y|yes|Yes|YES|n|N|no|No|NO|true|True|TRUE|false|False|FALSE|on|On|ON|off|Off|OFF` for parsing scalars as bools, it changed the _canonical_ presentation of bools from `y|n` to `true|false`, and it introduced the "schema" concept. It also introduced and recommended the use of the Core Schema, which uses `true|True|TRUE|false|False|FALSE` as the regex for inferring bools from scalars. But unsurprisingly, since using this schema is only a recommendation and not a requirement, many implementations elected to keep their backwards-compatible implementations that use the original regex.

So the Norway problem persists.

the recommendation was what caused the norway problem. it now strongly recommends not to do this, and it says that a Yaml parser should use the core schema unless instructed otherwise. going against the recommendation while saying that you're yaml 1.2 compliant feels like an issue that should be raised with the parser to me. I've never run into this issue in practice though.

is there a parser that says that it's Yaml 1.2 compliant that uses that regex? I don't know of one.

Why introduce all-new langugage, like Dhall, just for configuration? This seems like a total waste of time. And you still need to use "real" language (or bash) to write glue to connect to github configuration.

The config generators are very simple, and should to be written in whatever language your developers already know - which likely means Python or Javascript or Go.

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