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Comment by Patient0 | Hacker News Reader

The stack overflow page is disappointing because in my opinion all of the answers miss the point: Yaml is designed to be readable and editable by humans. Json is only designed to be human readable - and intentionally does not have features to support editing by people.

Json intentionally does not support comments. Think about that for a bit and you'll realise what Json is for and what it isn't for.

As SeoxyS said: use yaml for config files, Json for APIs.

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Actually, after finding out about TOML[1], I would suggest to look at it. It is a lot simpler than YAML, explicitly does not support dangerous features like deserializing arbitrary data structures, while being very readable. Spec is not entirely stable yet, though.

1: https://github.com/toml-lang/toml

Agreed. After using both YAML and TOML, I'd say that TOML is much more readable as compared to YAML.

TOML does indeed look good, reminds me of a extended .ini format

can you give me dumbed down example of 'deserializing arbitrary data structures' not sure i follow

We don't need two different languages for this.

Oh, yes, we do. We need a language targeted at humans that is machines can process and we need a language targeted at machine processing that is inspectable by humans. Those are two contradicting targets: the latter calls for simplicity, but the former calls for shortcuts[#] to make human's work easier, which adds, not reduces, complexity.

[#] Shortcuts like not quoting keys and omitting braces and commas in hash definition.

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