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I think I have a solution to keep the peace, if we can all universally respect one rule: Never use YAML outside of the Python ecosystem. That way, people who love esoteric scripting formats that prioritize legibility over correctness, durability, and maintainability can keep all their tab characters, loose typing, and cryptic syntax. And the rest of us never have to! Those of us who prefer C-style syntax can keep our sanity. Edit: OK, I think I've finally got my finger on the crux of the issue here. I think I can't explain this whole thing without being spicy. For C-syntax devs like myself, syntactic whitespace is pure madness. Whitespace is not information or an instruction -- it's formatting. Good formatting is helpful and useful, and good C-syntax devs care about legible formatting. In Python (and YAML), the formatting is instructional information. This has the benefit of making all functional code legible. But why the blazes does code have to be legible to be functional? Imagine working with a YAML coworker. You send them a long message. They reply with, "What? This is nonsense." You suddenly realize your mistake. Without separating your paragraphs with an empty line, you've broken the meaning of what you sent. Adding the empty lines back in and re-sending the chat message, your co-worker can now read what you wrote. Without syntactically-accurate formatting, the information you sent was meaningless. |
Those languages enforce a standard syntactic structure; there are less ways to write unreadable code, which is a good thing.