[tzcnt]

Developer ergonomics is drastically underappreciated, even in modern times. Since we're talking about textual data formats, I'll go out on a limb here and say that I hate YAML. Double checking exactly how many spaces are present on each line is tedious. It manages to make a simple task like copy-pasting something from a different file (at a different indentation level) into an error-prone process. I'll take angle brackets any day.

[chuckadams]

You haven’t felt hate until you’ve counted spaces in your Helm templates in order to know what value to put after `nindent`. The punchline is that k8s doesn’t even speak yaml, the protocol is all json and it’s the tooling that inflicts yaml on us. I can live with yaml as a config format, but once logic starts creeping in, give me anything else.

[formerly_proven]

Working with large YAML documents is incredibly annoying and shows the benefit of closing tags.

[4ndrewl]

It all went downhill after we stopped using .ini files

[Locutus_]

Well....toml isn't that much more than .ini files slightly brough up in feature support.

Again not great for bigger documents.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

JSON5 is a real sweet spot for me. Closing brackets, but I don't have to type every tag twice. Comments and trailing commas.

[consteval]

I find for deeply hierarchical data that XML is much easier to read.

[emporas]

Emacs has pretty print JSON which makes it very easy to read. I don't find it possible, XML displayed for human consumption to be better than that.

[froh]

interrsting. I find the signal/noise ratio of XML really bad.

what I really dread in XML though is that XML only has idref/id standardized, and no path references. so without tool support you can't navigate to a reference target.

which turns XML into the "binary" format for GUI tools.

[consteval]

> so without tool support you can't navigate to a reference target

Maybe, but XML tools are also just superior to JSON counterparts. XPath is fantastic, and so is XSD and XSLT. I also quite like the integration with .NET.

My general experience with JSON as a configuration language has been sad. It's a step back from XML in a lot of ways.

[froh]

yes, XML is very mature, and fun if you have access to advanced tools.

however most oss builds on libxml which is stuck in xslt 1 and xpath 2 iirc...

I recently stumbled upon James Clark's youngest brainchild the ballerina language.

https://ballerina.io/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_(programmer)#Caree...

[Pet_Ant]

> Developer ergonomics is drastically underappreciated, even in modern times.

When was the last time you had an editor that wouldn't just auto close the current tag with "</" ? I mean it's a god-send for knowing where you are at in large structure. You aren't scrolling to the top to find which tag you are in.