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).
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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.
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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.
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Yep, thatβs the one. Itβs the language they use for their products; itβs based on UCL but is simpler.
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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.
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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 :(
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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.
Jan 1, 2021 Β· 11:22 AM UTC
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