Why YAML sucks?

Any language in which whitespace has syntactic value is intrinsically flawed.

Can't speak to your specific issues, but that's why yaml will always suck.

Can people stop hating on shit?

FOR FUCKS SAKE, negative reinforcement dopamine has RUINED THE FUCKING NET.

EVERYWHERE I GO there's someone bitching about something, hate circlejerks are unbelievably popular, people just love to hate on stuff.

You're ruining your thought patterns with all these social media negativity bullshit.

Fucking TOML users hate on fucking YAML fucking C++ users hate Rust fucking Rust users hate literally everything under the sun and are insufferable to work with

EVERYONE, fucking CHILL

Programmers hate everything. You could design a spec which serenades you with angel song and feeds you chocolate dipped grapes and someone would be like: This is awful, my usecase is being a dog.

https://noyaml.com/

Because people over use it. YAML is pretty good for short config files that need to be human readable but it falls apart with complex multi line strings and escaping.

I think there are much better clearly delimited for machine reading purposes formats out there that you should prefer if you're writing a really heavy config file and, tbh, I think for everything else .ini is probably "good enough".

Following along with the style of your own post: YAML doesn't suck, because I feel so.

Thanks for asking.

One pattern I've noticed is people seeking a language that's better than {JSON,XML,INI,etc} at wrangling their slightly complex configuration files, noticing the additional features and type support offered by YAML, and assuming it will be a good solution.

Then, as their configs grow ever larger and more complex, they discover that expressing them in YAML requires large sections of deep nesting, long item sequences, and line wrapping. The syntax style that they saw working well in other places (e.g. certain programming languages) breaks down quickly at that level of complexity, making it difficult for humans to correctly write and follow, and leading to frequent errors.

YAML doesn't suck for small stuff, IMHO. (But it is more complex than necessary for small stuff.)

For things likely to grow to medium-large size or complexity, I would recommend either breaking up the data into separate files, or looking for a different config/serialization language.

I don’t like YAML because it’s overly complicated. The specification is like 80 pages long. How the hell did they think that was a good idea?

JSON on the other hand is super simple. It doesn’t do more than it needs to.

Just compare this: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

With this: https://www.json.org/json-en.html

The entire JSON specification is shorter than just the table of contents of the YAML specification!

Another thing I like about JSON is that you can format it however you want with the whitespace. Want everything on one line? Just write everything on one line!

If data can be represented as a JSON, then there’s generally only one way to represent it in JSON (apart from whitespace). In YAML the same data can be represented in 1000s of different ways. You pick one.

To paraphrase: There are two kinds of markup languages. Those that people complain about and those that nobody uses.

There is no silver bullet that will work perfectly for all use cases and we also don't want to use 100 different tools. So people use things that aren't perfect. But they're good enough. I don't think YAML is perfect and I still use it, because people know it and there are tons of tools already available.

I think TOML should replace YAML for config files, it is much clearer, easier to parse for a human.

YAML works great for small config files, or situations where your configuration is fully declarative. Go look at the Kubernetes API with its resources.

People think YAML sucks because everyone loves creating spaghetti config/templates with it.

One reason it tends to become an absolute unholy mess is because people work around the declarative nature of those APIs by shoving imperative code into it. Think complicated Helm charts with little snippets of logic and code all over the place. It just isn't really made for doing that.

It also forces your brain to switch back and forth between the two different paradigms. It doesn't just become hard to read, it becomes hard to reason about.

It sucks the same way Python sucks. Some people just really don't like indentation-based syntax. I'm one of them, so I dislike both formats. However, if you groove on that sort of thing, I don't think YAML is any worse than any other markup.

Oddly, I get along with Haskell, which also used indentation for scoping/delimiting; I can't explain that, except that, somehow, indentation-based syntax seems to fit better with functional languages. But I have no clear argument about why; it's just an oddity in my aesthetics.

I didn't use yaml much while it was gaining popularity, and therefore didn't pay much attention. But this article really made me pay attention and now I distrust anything that uses yaml in any capacity.

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

it does what it needs to do: i don't think it's necessarily bad.

it's for data not programming and it handles complex structures cleaner than json

I like yml. Clean to read, easy to use, supports comments.

But.. Yaml ain't markup language..

I hated yaml with every fiber of my being when first had to use it, but I really wanted to use HomeAssistant and see what I could do with it. I hated it a bit less when I started using docker compose. I started loving it when I started using it as a way to explain json to non-programming IT types, trying to explain it without braces and brackets seems to get across easier. I guess its more human readable, but as a result formatting has to be spot on (those indents and spaces replace the need for brackets and braces).

One useful trick if you truly hate it but need it, write it in json, then just use a converter to change that into yaml.

I don't hate YAML, but it has the same issues languages like PHP and JS introduce...there are unexpected corner cases that only exist because the designer wanted the language to be "friendly"

https://www.bram.us/2022/01/11/yaml-the-norway-problem/

YAML had comments and trailing commas, therefore it's objectively better than JSON. If you want a compromise solution that mostly looks like JSON, try JSON5.

"Why does YAML suck?" is a question. "Why YAML sucks" is an explanation.

I used to think json was the best until I found json lines or line delimited json. Thank me later. I use it all the time. You can append until you’re blue in the face. It’s great for log files. Each line is a valid json file.

It's inconsistent and annoying. Expressive, yes. Gets it's job done, yes. Absolute nightmare of a spec, YES.

The fact that JSON is a subset of YAML should tell you everything about how bloated the spec is. And of course there's the "no" funny things.

Personally, my favourite way to write configs was using lua (because it was already part of the project so why not), but JSON does fine.

I don't like it either, but I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe the biggest flaw to me is it uses Python style indentation for structuring as part of data logic. It doesn't feel like a configuration language to me and it does not feel simple too. It's also unlike most programming language structures (maybe besides Python), so it looks weird to read and write. Other than that, I don't know exactly why I don't like this format much. Admittedly, I did not do much in YAML, so because lack of experience take my opinion with a thick grain of salt.

We have JSON and TOML. I quiet like TOML. We have "better" alternatives, that are probably easier to parse. And therefore there is not much need for YAML. Maybe if YAML was the default config format for Python it would get off the ground and be accepted more often.

I think much of the issue with YAML is that it's often paired with bad editors. You need a way to manage the whitespace, collapse sections, etc. Notepad doesn't cut it.

If YAML and JSON were gripping my hands for dear life, dangling off of a cliff...

I would let both drop into the abyss so I could spend more time with INI.

I like TOML: https://TOML.io

White space/indentation as a construct of the syntax.

It’s why I have a hard time with python.

People have their likes and dislikes. Nothing wrong with that.

It's a rube goldberg footgun

I wish s-expression was a popular alternative. It's readable without the yaml issues.

YAML is fine if you use a subset (don't use the advanced features - not like you know those anyway) and use explicit strings (always add " to strings), otherwise things may be cast when you did not intend values to be cast.

Example:

country: NO (Norway) will be cast to country: False, because it'll cast no (regardless from casing) to false, and yes to true.

country: "NO" should not be cast.

cradles yaml in her hands and coos don't you talk to my baby like that! she has potential !

Somehow it’s clunky to use.

huh?

I find developing GitHub CI in YAML clunky.

I don't find configuring a simple service via YAML config, with a preset showing me and explaining what I can do clunky.

Yaml is fundamentally the same as the json and xml it has mostly replaced (and the toml that didn't manage to replace yaml)... it's a data serialization format and just doesn't have any facility for making abstractions, which are the main tool we human use to deal with complexity.

It's docs are garbage, but the language is quite simple and human readable even for non-techies. I think it's a bit too easy at times, resulting in people just kinda winging it