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Comment by brazzledazzle | Hacker News Reader

I really wish Apple would start using something like json or yaml. I hate plists.

Plain-text plists are basically a slightly more cleanly formatted JSON with support for comments. Binary plists are just a binary version of the same, but with some additional data types which were never backported to the plain text format. Nobody should “hate” either of them who doesn’t equally hate JSON and e.g. MessagePack. XML plists are a trainwreck and should never have existed.

YAML and JSON and property lists are all terrible formats (inflexible and underpowered, forcing people to add half-baked ad hoc extensions on top to do almost anything). I wish they would all go die in a fire in favor of something with better data structures and support for extension such as e.g. EDN.

I didn't know plain-text plists existed. The only ones I've dealt with have been the XML and binary lists. Apparently json ones do too. I'm wondering how much OS X supports them now.

JSON isn't great--I use YAML for anything where I'm not in Ruby where I can just use a DSL--but they, and even well-thought-out XML, have the advantage of being usable by normal people. I have yet to see EDN that both didn't require a significant amount of work to set up and didn't look downright offensive. (Usually it's both.)

json and yaml didn't exist in the late 1980s when NEXTSTEP was developed.

It is also no longer the 1980s and hasn't been for a while now.

Right -- it's simply legacy. Too much work to change it now for not enough benefit.

In 20 years we'll say the same thing about json and yaml. In fact I say it about yaml now.

Nor in the late 90's when the modern property list format was devised.

I'm not saying they made a bad choice.

Nor did x64... but did that stop them?

yaml is a disaster.

json or toml.

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