noyaml VS hjson

> less special character noise

I hope you've at least once stumbled upon the existence of https://noyaml.com/ and/or, at the time, were familiar with the quirks regarding number interpretation.

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/

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/

There's also HJSON, which stands for Human JSON.

https://hjson.github.io/

It has implementations in JavaScript, C#, C++, Go, Java, Lua, PHP, Python, Rust.

The JSON hiccup occured to me - I don't have any JSON dotfiles but I guess I'd store it as hjson (https://hjson.github.io/) and add a conversion step.

Symlinking a directory - admittedly didn't come up for my dotfiles, maybe `.ln` files with a similar format in dir roots.

Commands - yes, I still keep a set of shell scripts alongside my config files.

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.