this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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I like this. I also like yaml, I've had very few issues with it and it's nicer to work with than json.
Json's lack of support for trailing commas and comments makes it very annoying for everyday use.
Just the other day I had a list show up as ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", false, "g", "h", "i"].
The issue was that, without me being overly aware of it, the data was going through a data -> yaml -> data step.
Yes, the data -> yaml filter was broken for not putting general strings in quotes. But IMO the yaml design invites these odd "rare" bugs.
I used to like yaml, but was happy to see Toml taking the niche of human-readable-JSON, but felt the format for nested key-value was a weird choice. However, I've always felt we could just have extended JSON a bit (allow line breaks, comments, if the outermost data type is an object, the curly brackets may be omitted).
Using YAML as an intermediate format between steps of a process is a mistake. I love YAML for configuration but I’d never use it for machine-to-machine anything. If the tool you’re feeding data to requires YAML as input, just give it JSON. All JSON is valid YAML.
Edit: I realize you weren’t the one who made that decision. I’m saying the problem isn’t YAML, the problem is someone using YAML inappropriately.
Significant white-space is bullshit and i will die on this hill.
You're going to indent your code anyway, so why not let the indentation carry meaning?
Because yaml is not a programming language, and debugging why your whatever you're configuring isn't working correctly can be a nightmare. It doesn't tell you you missed an indent on a block, it just assumes it should be there and changes the meaning.
Braces are visually clear.
Is there space left on the hill? I want to join you.
I hear there's significant space left
Their whole thing is that they don't want to care about it, so if you get to the hill and there's no space, you're SOL.
But it's only white space. That's kinda racist.
significant white space to it's classist and racist
Yeah I just want JSON with optionally quoted keys, and comments.
JSON5 my beloved
Preach!