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by 29athrowaway 469 days ago
Not that hard to write something that outputs YAML.

The usefulness of YAML is having declarative files that are simple.

But once you start adding templating it sucks as much as anything else.

2 comments

> Not that hard to write something that outputs YAML.

The point of this is to lower the entry cost of producing interactive CLI apps. If I have to break out a more expressive language to use it I may as well just write my program in that language in the first place.

> The usefulness of YAML is having declarative files that are simple.

There are other config formats that provide this and don’t rely on sometimes ambiguous whitespace based structure (eg. TOML). While you can write JSON in a YAML file to avoid this, you’ve then nullified all of the supposed ‘benefits’ of YAML.

the real fun happens when you're doing templates inside of templates and you have to figure out how to escape quote characters correctly