On: YAML: probably not so great after all (2017)

[jiveturkey]

> JSON doesn't support comments

eh?

{ "firstName": "John", "lastName": "Smith", "comment": "foo", }

I know it isn't the same as #comments, but who cares really.

[Smaug123 → jiveturkey]

The trouble there is that your comments come in-band. What if you're trying to serialise something and you don't have the power to insist that it's not a dictionary with "comment" as a key?

[hexane360 → jiveturkey]

It seems the main difference is your comments are all parsed and loaded into memory with the file, while official comments aren't.

[dharmab → jiveturkey]

How do I do something like:

{ # comment with a note about the value of foo "foo": "bar", # comment with a note about the value of baz "baz": "qux" }

Without driving myself and future readers insane with fooComments and bazComments?

What if I need a multiline comment explaining a yak-shaving story for why a key is set to a certain value?

What if the object in question is a set of keyword arguments, and adding new fields changes the behavior of whaever is parsing the document?

[mottosso → dharmab]

Ok, I'll bite.

  {
    "#": "A foo variable",
    "foo": true,

    "#": "A bar variable",
    "bar": false
  }

Alternatively.

  {
    "# A foo variable": "",
    "foo": true,

    "# A multiline..": "",
    "# .. bar variable": "",
    "bar": false
  }

Presto!

[_ugfj → mottosso]

Sigh. All I wanted to do is to say thanks for the YAML standard -- comments are important but not the only problem with JSON. And truly I can't be expected to remember all of this discussion from like six plus years ago. One thing I remember though, it the trailing comma problem -- we upstreamed a grammar change to Doctrine annotation so "foo, bar," is OK because PHP arrays accept that and it's bonkers trying to code a mostly PHP system without trailing comma support. Also, JSON is no fun to write , you need to have [] {} all correct where YAML is much easier. The less sigils the better and most of Drupal YAMLs only use the dash, the colon and the quote. This is the grave mistake Doctrine committed as well, instead of simple arithmetic (>=1.0) they used mysterious sigils in version specification (~1.0). Drupal is in the business of constantly accepting new contributors and (~R∊R∘.×R)/R←1↓ιR is not newbie friendly, no matter how you slice and dice it. There are certainly advantages of sigil heavy languages like APL and Perl but the scare factor is too high.

[jiveturkey → _ugfj]

fair enough, but then you probably shouldn't have led off your earlier comment with "that simple".

[goatlover → mottosso]

That's just ugly and you're mixing your comments with the data structure, which is potentially confusing. Also, Jason requires a lot more typing. I don't want to have to manually add in all the brackets, quotes and commas when editing config a file.

[mypalmike → mottosso]

Presto! You have a duplicate key in the first example.

Also...

  print (json.dumps(json.loads(js_data), indent=2))

  {
    "bar": false,
    "foo": true,
    "# A multiline..": "",
    "# .. bar variable": "",
    "# A foo variable": ""
  }

Presto! ;-)

[trynewideas → jiveturkey]

> who cares really

the person who came up with HOCON, probably