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Your tone suggests you think it's obviously infeasible to read the whole YAML speed before using it. But it is possible to read the whole JSON spec [1]. It takes less than a minute.

[1] https://www.json.org/json-en.html

Saying that all formats have edge cases as an excuse for YAML's glaring faults is, frankly, a cop out. Like if a bridge collapses when a leaf lands on it and saying, well, all bridges have some maximum load. Yes, but in this case it's so bad it's just not useful for anything.




My comment was to point out how ridiculous the parents comment is in response to the article.

What does the length of the JSON spec have to do with my comment? The parent comment says if you don’t read all your docs you will be bit by an innocuous bug. You linked to a short spec, but that doesn’t mean anything in this context.

> Like if a bridge collapses when a leaf lands on it and saying, well, all bridges have some maximum load.

Is that what you got from reading my comment or the article? Is that what yaml is like?


Sorry, I misread the flow of the conversation. If anything my comment made more sense as a reply to the one you replied to, rather than yours.

More specifically, I missed the first line of their comment: "Are people not even reading about what they are using?" If you miss off that line, then it sounds (to me) that they're arguing YAML is a terrible format. With that line, it turns out they think it's reasonable, so long as you read the (huge) spec first. Madness!


No problem! I should have quoted that bit at the top of my original comment, as you aren’t the only one who read it that way.


It's not addressing what you said. I don't think what you said is very relevant, as the "read the spec" doesn't add anything to a discussion about whether something is a good idea to use. Length of spec is relevant to that question.


Thanks, I havent seen that before. It took me 10 minutes to go through and it is very clear (took a moment to realize whitespace also alllows no character).

A couple of years ago I looked at tutorials and found it very confusing, but the spec is just great.


While you’re right it’s a shorter spec (setting aside if you’re right about your broader point) this [0] is a more reasonable spec. Even JSON with its microscopic spec has implementation details, inconsistencies, and errata. Is this why we can’t have nice things?

[0] - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7159




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