[lukeschlather]

I don't really think YAML is the problem, it's the string-based templating. I'd like to see Emrichen or something like it become more common. And Emrichen is format-agnostic, you can write your stuff in json or YAML and it looks and works pretty similarly. (Although I stick to yaml.)

https://github.com/con2/emrichen

If JSON had comments I might lean toward json.

[kevincox]

100%. Target unaware templating is always a mistake. It is unfortunately common in our industry because it is easy and works most of the time. But this is also why SQL injections and XSS are one of the most common vulnerability. SQL injections are getting better because people are more often using parameterized queries which never need to actually encode the values into the "template" and XSS is getting better because most big frameworks now have target-aware templating that properly serializes values. But these are both hugely common issues. Look up a tutorial about how to use SQL or make your first website and more likely than not you will see examples that have vulnerabilities. Our whole industry is teaching the wrong thing by default, then hoping to fix it later.

String concatenation may have been a mistake. The concept of a string may have been a mistake. Every sequence of bytes has some structure, and in order to mash two "strings" together they need to be serialized in the correct way. Even when building error messages it would be nice if you can reliably identify the "chrome" from the "content".

Also look at terminal escape sequences. When we print text to a terminal we should probably be replacing non-printable characters with some sort of encoding so that the reader can understand that 1. these are from the content not the application and 2. Not do stuff like delete the output line to trick the reader.

Every time you put two strings together you should think about how you need to properly encode one into the other. Output unaware text templating almost always fails this because it relies on the user to do this for every single interpolation, and that is doomed to fail.

I wrote an even longer rant about this on my blog a while ago: https://kevincox.ca/2022/02/08/escape-everything/

[jauntywundrkind]

JSON5, JSONC, and others have comments.

Also, there's the old dirt hack

  {"item": "this is a comment",
  "item": "//so is this but more obvious",
  "item": "because in 99.99% of implementations, last value wins:"
  "item": 42}

[bvrmn]

It's kinda important to keep comments on automated transformations.