edn VS noyaml

> was utterly surprised how no one ever apparently has thought to create a configuration/templating system that's basically a fancy library on top of Scheme.

There's Clojure's extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

A thin language layer around edn/datalog, the query language

EDN (Extensible Data Notation) is a subset of Clojure: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

It is:

- Streamable

- Extensible

- Whitespace-insensitive, but there are formatting conventions for readability

To begin with, EDN is somewhat like the JSON of Clojure. And regarding the code is data/data is code nature of Clojure, it is Clojure. It doesn't have some of the vagaries of JSON, and it is also extensible.

Alien is not a reason something is bad, just that's it's unusual. JSON was a bit alien when it first arrived as well, as everyone was used to XML at the time.

`{num 5, val 4}` looks fine to me, but we can do even better! We already know objects/maps are always in pairs, so we don't really need that comma either. Just do `{num 5 val 4}` and we save yet another unnecessary characters.

Of course, I didn't come up with this format myself, what I actually want JSON to be is EDN (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) which is a standalone format but also directly used in Clojure, so it already exists inside a programming language and works very well. There keys are strings though, so you example would end up being `{"num" 5 "val" 5 "person" var}`, where commas are optional.

I just checked out the spec, and it gets pretty ugly in the Table section. A lot of the json examples are both shorter and IMO more precise. Stuff that’s not allowed with [table] is allowed with [[table]], and it’s confusing to understand what level of depth I’m at.

I’ll take edn over any of “em. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

As XT is written in Clojure and it natively supports Clojure’s data types, we were not satisfied with available JSON types and decided to give EDN a try - that way we would have way more supported types:

Compare the nightmare that is pickling with how simple it is to serialize pure data with edn in clojure. What ends up happening is people passing around JSONs or whatever and writing parsing/encoding code at each end, which makes things unnecessarily more complex, and dangerous, and error prone, and boring, etc...

Most commonly written in YAML, these files are large and complex to read and understand. And being written in YAML comes with its challenges (and quirks) since it is an additional programming language that devs need to learn.

YAML is kind of like C++:

> You like C++ because you're only using 20% of it. And that's fine, everyone only uses 20% of C++, the problem is that everyone uses a different 20% :)

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2009/10/17/the-c-bashing-seaso...

The YAML footguns are too numerous to reproduce here, so here are some sources:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3790454/how-do-i-break-a...

https://www.arp242.net/yaml-config.html

https://noyaml.com/

Relevant: https://noyaml.com/

YAML and its ecosystem is full of footguns and ergonomics problems, especially when the length of the document extends beyond the height of a user's editor or viewport. Loss of context with indentation, non-compliant or unsafe parsers, and strange boolean handling to name a few.

It becomes even worse when people decide that static YAML data files should have variable substitution or control flow via templating. "Stringly-typed programming" if you will. If we all started writing JSON text templates I think a lot of people would rightly argue we should write small stdlib-only programs in Python, Typescript, or Ruby to emit this JSON instead of using templated text files. Then it becomes apparent that the YAML template isn't a static data file at all, but part of a program which emits YAML as output. We're already exposing people to basic programming if we're using YAML templates. People brew a special kind of YAML-templated devops hell using tools like Kustomize and Helm, each of which are "just YAML" but are full of idiosyncracies and tool-specific behaviour which make the use of YAML almost coincidental rather than a necessity.

Yes, sometimes people would prefer to look at YAML instead of JSON, in which case I suggest you use a YAML serialization library, or pipe output into a tool like `yq` so you can view the pretty output. In a pinch you could even output JSON and then feed it through a YAML formatter.

The Kubernetes community seems to have this penetrating "oh, it's just YAML" philosophy which means we get mediocre DSLs in "just YAML" which actually encode a lot of nuanced and unintuitive behaviour which varies from tool to tool.

Look at kyverno, for examle: it uses _parentheses_ in YAML key names to change the semantics of security policies! https://kyverno.io/docs/writing-policies/validate/ . This is different to what I think is the (much better ideas of) something like kubewarden, gatekeeper, or jspolicy, which allow engineers to write their policies in anything that compiles to WASM, OPA, and Typescript/Javascript respectively.

We engineers, as a discipline, have decades of know-how building and using general purpose programming languages with type checkers, linters, packaging systems, and other tools, but we throw them all away as soon as YAML comes along. It's time to put the stringified YAML templates away and engage in the ecosystem of mature tools we already to use to perform one simple task they are already good at: dumping JSON on stdout.

Let's move the control flow back into the tool and out of the YAML.

The webpage documenting some of the sharp edges of yaml is also displayed as an editable yaml document

https://noyaml.com/

It’s the least secure config format, even worse than XML IMO since it’s unsafe even with trusted inputs. https://noyaml.com/