[voidUpdate]

> "To that end, configuration is defined in a YAML file called the request collection"

Genuine question, why do people use YAML? I've been using it a little bit recently (reading existing documents, not writing my own), and it just seems like a more overcomplicated and less human-readable version of JSON? With potential security vulnerabilities?

[kalaksi]

If not using any esoteric features, it's more human readable (imo), easier to write, can have comments and has some useful features like different kind of multi-line values. JSON is valid YAML, by the way.

[skywhopper]

There’s lots of overengineered features in YAML that are problematic, but at a high level, it’s much, much more human-friendly than JSON. And if you love JSON, good news: it’s 100% valid YAML.

[mystifyingpoi]

> less human-readable version of JSON

Please provide an example, how YAML can be less readable than JSON. I struggle to think of any.

[voidUpdate]

Indentation based structure isn't really a good thing in my eyes, where the format of the document encodes semantic meaning. With JSON, you can display it how you want, and because it's bracketed it will still encode the same data.

Also I really don't like the hyphen notation... This is very unreadable to me:

  - a
  - b: c
  - - d

[embedding-shape]

YAML:

  - - "hello"

YAML expanded:

  -
    - "hello"

JSON (typical formatting):

  [
    [
      "hello"
    ]
  ]

And EDN for good measure:

  [["hello"]]

I know which one I prefer :) Silly example perhaps, but once you have X lists nested in Y lists, it does become a lot easier to see why some prefer a bit more visually hierarchically stronger syntaxes

[skydhash]

I still prefer ini files for configuration. Easier to grep and sed.

[tracker1]

You can get a bit more if you use TOML over INI... it's similar at a baseline, but still a bit more rich for advanced configuration than INI is.

[beart]

They work wonderfully until you need to do anything more advanced than a key-value store.

[skydhash]

My belief is that anything that requires more than that are hiding the fact that what they truly need is a DSL. Instead they force you to write AST (ansible, github actions, docker compose,…)

[amazingman]

People use YAML because a bunch of other people use YAML. Whatever its warts, there's no use resisting it.

[t-kalinowski]

Because YAML is the worst config format, except for all the others.

https://opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-05-21_in-defense-of-ya...

[voidUpdate]

Seems like that article is saying that YAML 1.1 is bad, but 1.2 is good? Which would be fine, except I am parsing YAML 1.1 files (as indicated by a directive at the top). I don't control the format of the data

[speed_spread]

Because as long as you stay away from anchors and inline JSON, YAML is a perfectly workable, structured, human-readable format that supports comments.

[bschwindHN]

> it just seems like a more overcomplicated

Because people LOVE overcomplicated shit. You see it happen everywhere.

[kalaksi]

I don't think that's it