It’s rather trendy to hate on YAML these days, what with all the “YAML
Programmers” out there. But YAML is still the most human friendly
language for the type of voluminous declarative configuration data it
handles, even more so now that yaml.v3 Go package insists on
four-space indent for the defaults. This will push out indentation to
the point were people will break up stuff into more modular YAML files.
It’s the reason that six-space indent is not a bad thing. It forces
you to rethink that extra unnecessary nesting and do it better.
A few weeks back I was predicting that something better would come along. But I don’t think that anymore. Just heard the creator of Porter talking about that on the Go Time podcast. People think they want “convention over configuration” which means they want logic in their templates and configuration files, they really fucking don’t. Adding that means you get another layer of abstraction and gets all complicated and ends up with another declarative wrapper around it.
So stop fucking complaining about YAML and embrace the joy that is allowing you to put comments in your code, allowing well-formed and readable block paragraphs of text, and protecting you from typing all those double quotes that you would be otherwise typing to do this all in JSON, or worse XML.
In fact, after reading a recent take down of TOML I can’t even get behind it anymore (even though I made the logo). TOML creates a disjointedness that causes confusion in larger configurations. YAML hides that — especially the way people use it today (without the pointers and dereferencing).