Programming

17484 readers

55 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Why YAML sucks? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

146 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I feel that Yaml sucks. I understand the need for such markup language but I think it sucks. Somehow it's clunky to use. Can you explain why?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

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.