On: YAML: Probably not so great after all

[matt_kantor]

An encoder is anything that serializes some data. Think `JSON.stringify()`.

[sk5t → matt_kantor]

YMMV, I believe most folks would call that "serialization," reserving "encoding" for turning a notionally written-down-ish representation into bytes; e.g. string -> utf8 bytes, or float -> IEEE-754 bytes.

[regecks → sk5t]

Right, for some reason in Go (which Helm is written in), the standard library calls them encoders/decoders with marshal/unmarshal as the operations. Serialize is definitely the more common term generally.

[matt_kantor → sk5t]

I've seen it used even more generally for any `A -> B` (or `A -> Option<B>`) where B could be faithfully decoded back to A.

In my head, serialization is a special case of encoding when B is some type of string. In this case it's YAML.

I could probably have worded my previous comment more precisely.