On: The Norway Problem

[svnpenn]

You seem pretty quick to disregard TOML. I switched all my JSON and YAML for TOML. Do you care to detail what is missing?

[atombender → svnpenn]

TOML quickly breaks down with lots of nested arrays of objects. For example:

    a:
      b:
      - c: 1
      - d:
        - e: 2
        - f:
            g: 3

Turns into this, which is unreadable:

    [[a.b]]
    c = 1

    [[a.b]]
    [[a.b.d]]
    e = 2

    [[a.b.d]]
    [a.b.d.f]
    g = 3

TOML also has a few restrictions, such as not supporting mixed-type arrays like [1, "hello", true], or arrays at the root of the data. JSON can represent any TOML value (as far as I know), but TOML cannot represent any JSON value.

At my company we use YAML a lot for table-driven tests (e.g. [1]), and this not only means lots of nested arrays, but also having to represent pure data (i.e. the expected output of a test), which requires a format that supports encoding arbitrary "pure" data structures of arrays, numbers, strings, booleans, and objects.

[1] https://github.com/sanity-io/groq-test-suite/

[svnpenn → atombender]

Looks fine to me:

    [[a.b]]
    c = 1
    d = [
       { e = 2 },
       { f = { g = 3 } }
    ]

[timClicks → svnpenn]

An improvement, but the original YAML is still significantly better, in my opinion.

[Arnavion → timClicks]

Also many (most? all?) serializers don't let you control which fields are serialized inline vs not. So if you have a program that generates configuration, you're going to end up with the original unreadable form anyway.