Programming

it does what it needs to do: i don't think it's necessarily bad.

it's for data not programming and it handles complex structures cleaner than json

If YAML and JSON were gripping my hands for dear life, dangling off of a cliff...

I would let both drop into the abyss so I could spend more time with INI.

I think much of the issue with YAML is that it's often paired with bad editors. You need a way to manage the whitespace, collapse sections, etc. Notepad doesn't cut it.

https://noyaml.com/

I wish s-expression was a popular alternative. It's readable without the yaml issues.

But.. Yaml ain't markup language..

I don’t like YAML because it’s overly complicated. The specification is like 80 pages long. How the hell did they think that was a good idea?

JSON on the other hand is super simple. It doesn’t do more than it needs to.

Just compare this: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

With this: https://www.json.org/json-en.html

The entire JSON specification is shorter than just the table of contents of the YAML specification!

Another thing I like about JSON is that you can format it however you want with the whitespace. Want everything on one line? Just write everything on one line!

If data can be represented as a JSON, then there’s generally only one way to represent it in JSON (apart from whitespace). In YAML the same data can be represented in 1000s of different ways. You pick one.

One pattern I've noticed is people seeking a language that's better than {JSON,XML,INI,etc} at wrangling their slightly complex configuration files, noticing the additional features and type support offered by YAML, and assuming it will be a good solution.

Then, as their configs grow ever larger and more complex, they discover that expressing them in YAML requires large sections of deep nesting, long item sequences, and line wrapping. The syntax style that they saw working well in other places (e.g. certain programming languages) breaks down quickly at that level of complexity, making it difficult for humans to correctly write and follow, and leading to frequent errors.

YAML doesn't suck for small stuff, IMHO. (But it is more complex than necessary for small stuff.)

For things likely to grow to medium-large size or complexity, I would recommend either breaking up the data into separate files, or looking for a different config/serialization language.

I like yml. Clean to read, easy to use, supports comments.

I think TOML should replace YAML for config files, it is much clearer, easier to parse for a human.

"Why does YAML suck?" is a question. "Why YAML sucks" is an explanation.

I don't like it either, but I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe the biggest flaw to me is it uses Python style indentation for structuring as part of data logic. It doesn't feel like a configuration language to me and it does not feel simple too. It's also unlike most programming language structures (maybe besides Python), so it looks weird to read and write. Other than that, I don't know exactly why I don't like this format much. Admittedly, I did not do much in YAML, so because lack of experience take my opinion with a thick grain of salt.

We have JSON and TOML. I quiet like TOML. We have "better" alternatives, that are probably easier to parse. And therefore there is not much need for YAML. Maybe if YAML was the default config format for Python it would get off the ground and be accepted more often.

It sucks the same way Python sucks. Some people just really don't like indentation-based syntax. I'm one of them, so I dislike both formats. However, if you groove on that sort of thing, I don't think YAML is any worse than any other markup.

Oddly, I get along with Haskell, which also used indentation for scoping/delimiting; I can't explain that, except that, somehow, indentation-based syntax seems to fit better with functional languages. But I have no clear argument about why; it's just an oddity in my aesthetics.

I don't hate YAML, but it has the same issues languages like PHP and JS introduce...there are unexpected corner cases that only exist because the designer wanted the language to be "friendly"

https://www.bram.us/2022/01/11/yaml-the-norway-problem/

Yes, they could've just used JSON. Totally pointless waste of time.

Because people over use it. YAML is pretty good for short config files that need to be human readable but it falls apart with complex multi line strings and escaping.

I think there are much better clearly delimited for machine reading purposes formats out there that you should prefer if you're writing a really heavy config file and, tbh, I think for everything else .ini is probably "good enough".

Any language in which whitespace has syntactic value is intrinsically flawed.

Can't speak to your specific issues, but that's why yaml will always suck.