edn VS yamllint

> 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...

yamllint, as the name suggests, is a linter for YAML files. It checks syntax validity, as well as looking for more-complex errors like key repetition and cosmetic problems such as line length, trailing spaces, indentation etc. This one was indly recommended by yankdevil.

StrictYAML removes features that might be useful for some usecases, such as Node anchors+Refs and Flow Style.

I don't think the cost of an additional standard is worth it in this case.

While YAML has issues, they aren't much of problem if you use a linter, such as yamllint [1].

1. https://github.com/adrienverge/yamllint

On top of the above-mentioned tools, it's also a good idea to use YAML linter such this one or its CLI equivalent, which will validate and cleanup your documents.

yamlfixer automates the fixing of problems reported by yamllint by parsing its output.

repos: - repo: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks rev: v4.0.1 hooks: - id: check-added-large-files - id: check-ast - id: check-builtin-literals - id: check-case-conflict - id: check-docstring-first - id: check-executables-have-shebangs - id: check-json - id: check-merge-conflict - id: check-symlinks - id: check-toml - id: check-vcs-permalinks - id: check-xml - id: check-yaml args: [--allow-multiple-documents] - id: debug-statements - id: detect-aws-credentials args: [--allow-missing-credentials] - id: destroyed-symlinks - id: end-of-file-fixer - id: fix-byte-order-marker - id: fix-encoding-pragma args: [--remove] - id: forbid-new-submodules - id: mixed-line-ending args: [--fix=auto] - id: name-tests-test args: [--django] - id: requirements-txt-fixer - id: trailing-whitespace - repo: local hooks: - id: black name: black entry: poetry run black language: system types: [python] - id: flake8 name: flake8 entry: poetry run flake8 language: system types: [python] - repo: https://github.com/pycqa/isort rev: "5.9.1" hooks: - id: isort args: - --profile - black - --filter-files - repo: https://github.com/adrienverge/yamllint.git rev: v1.26.1 hooks: - id: yamllint args: [-c=.yamllint.yaml] - repo: https://gitlab.com/devopshq/gitlab-ci-linter rev: v1.0.2 hooks: - id: gitlab-ci-linter args: - "--server" - "https://your.gitlab.server" # Need env var GITLAB_PRIVATE_TOKEN with gitlab api read token - repo: https://github.com/commitizen-tools/commitizen rev: v2.17.11 hooks: - id: commitizen stages: [commit-msg] - repo: https://github.com/jumanjihouse/pre-commit-hooks rev: 2.1.5 # or specific git tag hooks: - id: forbid-binary - id: shellcheck - id: shfmt

If you wanted a linter.

Or, run Yamllint externally. I do this, because I have more control: https://github.com/adrienverge/yamllint

You can catch this with yamllint (https://github.com/adrienverge/yamllint):

    % cat countries.yml