hjson VS strictyaml

HJson https://hjson.github.io seems a nice 'in-between' between YAML and JSON without the indentation-based syntax, so closer to the JSON side but with comments and less quotes.

What I don't really get is why the cloud providers / tooling implementors have never drafted up a "YAML-light" that just throws out the rarely-used headache-inducing syntax elements.

Hjson is very similar to JSON5 but allows quotes to be dropped and can use newlines instead of commas. There are implementations for a lot of different languages, I myself contributed the C++ implementation. I wanted something smaller than Yaml but more lax than JSON, found Hjson to suit my needs perfectly.

https://hjson.github.io/

JSONs make terrible config files. If you want to use json-like syntax for config, use hjson instead. It's basically json, but changes it slightly so it better matches human expectations.

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YAML and JSON succeeded because they had a clean and predictable, no-nonsense mapping between encoding and object-model after decoding. Probably we should all switch to an almost-yaml format that does away with the peculiarities, and the FANG companies would have the momentum to make that happen.

I personally would like for HJSON (https://hjson.github.io) to see more adoption, but that train has passed...

There’s also json-c and Hjson.

NestedText already is the way I use YAML; everything is intepreted as a string. I have some trust in my YAML parser to not mangle most strings. I could use NestedText, but users would be unfamiliar with it, and IIRC the only parsers are in Python. But then I could use StrictYaml too https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml

you can stick to a subset of YAML syntax (e.g. strictYAML)

YAML stands for "YAML Ain’t Markup Language" - this is known as a recursive acronym. YAML is often used for writing configuration files. It’s human readable, easy to understand and can be used with other programming languages. Although YAML is commonly used in many disciplines, it has received criticism on the amoutn of whitespace .yml files have, difficulty in editing, and complexity of the standard. Despite the criticism, properly using YAML ensures that you can reproduce the results of a project and makes sure that the virtual environment packages play nicely with system packages. (If you're looking for another way to share environments there are other alternatives to YAML which include StrictYAML (a type-safe YAML parser) and NestedText)

The example you linked provides this as an example of a YAML document that he wants his format to support.

That safe subset exists and is implemented in a number of languages. It is called strict-yaml: https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/

StrictYAML\ (33 comments)

To me those are in the category of "nice to have", and the problem is that every developer has different preferences for these [1] [2]. But the main features of StrictYaml, like supporting comments and less syntactic noise, I think are pretty uncontroversial, and perhaps it's worth it to get people to switch over for those alone. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be a significant enough improvement over JSON, and I'd say those two features are more than enough

[1]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/37

[2]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/38