Maybe 2021 will be the year the tech industry stops using YAML for everything.

What would you prefer as a structured data format which isn't entirely awful for humans to interact with? The condition I place on it is that as a human I'm not made sad. json, xml, toml, all make me sad. (YAML makes me _less_ sad, but not happy).

If humans don't need to touch it, then I'm relatively agnostic, just for the love of god stop trying to have machines generate YAML for machines to use! For humans, I'd prefer something simple, no gotchas, readable and writable. Maybe easy to generate. HCL mostly fits into that.

YAML is certainly not an information interchange language, I agree. JSON fits the bill quite nicely for that IMO. I've never seen HCL before (assuming you mean 'Hashicorp Configuration Language') so I'll take a look at it.

My problem with JSON is it’s awkward to write, slightly painful to read, and isn’t designed for humans to interact with. Supersets like Jsonnet kind of address that but it’s just hiding the problem.