Maybe 2021 will be the year the tech industry stops using YAML for everything.
7
7
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).
1
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.
1
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.
2
Yep, that’s the one. It’s the language they use for their products; it’s based on UCL but is simpler.
1
I haven't found a formal language definition yet, other than "compatible with json" is there something obvious I'm missing? On the face of it, it seems to have some niceness for humans at least.
1
github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blo… github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blo…
1
ta.
1
Replying to @dsilverstone @jogbert
Well, that looks quite nice from a configuration language perspective. Sadly I can't find much pleasant in the Rust ecosystem for using it which limits my ability to experiment with it greatly. While it still makes me sad, YAML does have wide reaching implementation support :(

Jan 1, 2021 Β· 11:16 AM UTC

2
Replying to @dsilverstone
Yeah. HCL hasn't had a lot of use outside of HashiCorp's products, and they're a big Go shop so their Go impl is the de-facto one and very little use outside of that. I'd love to see other implementations, including an alternative (simpler) Go one.
Replying to @dsilverstone
Sadly I suppose that is why YAML (and JSON) have their reach; lots of implementations, or can hook into the C bindings.
1
Yeah, wide-reaching support is critical for whatever will replace YAML. So here's hoping someone with polyglot programming chops decides to tackle something like HCL because it does look pretty nice.
1