That's his critique of YAML? That it is too pythonic? You're not getting far in convincing people of something being bad, if your top argument is "It is like python".
Personally, I love both Python and YAML for this exact reason (among others). Explaining a hierarchical system using indentation to an average person isn't too difficult, but even very smart non-tech people will get confused by explicitly opened and closed blocks (if-endif or { }). Without proper indentation, the code is unreadable anyway, so why not actually take advantage of that and get rid of the bracket soup that means nothing to you anyways.
If you mix you are asking for trouble, and if you allow to be configured, half will pick one the other will pick other.
So the only sane choice is to just pick one and enforce it.
And by now most of the editors have python rules baled in, so it's not big problem in practice.
By python standard one level is exactly 4 spaces
I actually see Make's use of tabs a great example of why they make more sense for indentation, especially when it matters. 1 \t => +1 level of indentation. No guessing the number of spaces and praying it stays consistent throughout the file.
The problem is that after explaining -- for the 50 gajillionth time -- that "it's a tab, not X spaces", I get a little frustrated.
Semantic white space (originally called "The Offside Rule") predates Python.
I believe it was originally invented by Peter J. Landin[1], and yes the name is a joke about football.
The main problem for me is that it makes copy and paste more difficult. You can't just let the editor reformat for you and you have to be more careful with what you comment out.
Python devs seem to live with that OK though (I'm told) so maybe it's not such a big deal.
YAML sort of allows you to do the same using anchors but I find it doesn't help readability as much and sometimes hinders it. I think this might be because in yaml you are describing a data structure and it's far easier to understand that data structure if you can see the whole thing at once.
In python you are describing code and for some reason in my head functions as an abstraction in code make it more not less readable.
Heh, that makes for a good snark for dismissing the white space complaint, it's all from copy-paste programmers! (Or is more properly black space for all you darkmode lovers)
> [...] you have to be more careful with what you comment out.
Not sure if I get what you mean? I think python lacking proper multi-line comments (making things you want to ignore a multi-line string isn't as neat) is an irritant, but I don't get how semantic white space impacts the complexity of commenting?
(XML and JSON are in the same bucket for me, both are simple to create and simple to parse, YAML on the other hand...)
To be fair... so is yaml.
(Comparison with indent-based program programming languages like Python and Haskell is not completely appropriate, because one typically avoids too many nesting levels when writing code. But in a large YAML file you might just need to go deep.)
If it were JSON, I could navigate within a subtree by selecting & searching the text between the `{}` delimiters. But instead, I have to gently scroll downwards, keeping a careful eye on the indentation, to see whether I've moved into the adjacent subtree.
An example of my common use case is digging through a Bosh manifest file for a resource with a particular name, then finding, say, the VM type associated with that resource. The name and vm_type fields may be separated by hundreds of lines (it's a machine-generated file that does not retain element order), but they're siblings of each other.
In vim, I could land on the first { and then hit:
v% (extend selection to matching delimiter)
/\%Vvmtype: (to search for "vmtype:" within the selection).
It's absolutely correct that this is a tooling problem. You could imagine a YML plugin for IntelliJ or vim smart enough to offer a motion for "select all the children of this block," but AFAICT no such tool exists.
I'm sure that some people will scoff and point to anchors as exactly the kind of complexity a configuration format shouldn't have. But I've personally found them extremely useful and straightforward.
Now I’m more than happy to endure a little extra typing in order to be able to defer code formatting in complete confidence to prettier.
How are tags or brackets better here? The "urgh, where's the missing bracket!?" problem has been with us for decades and it's not likely to go away until we move from text editors to structured editors. At least you don't have the problem of misleading looking indentation when the indentation itself is the single source of truth.
Especially after you tried configuring an application which has pages-long comments with commented out examples that are misaligned to indentation, and an app takes few minutes to show you an config error.
It is completely impractical - it looks nice - but we aren't writing for YAML for non-technical users, we are writing it for machines and other technical users.
I seriously wonder why TOML isn't popular.
TOML is good, but it quickly gets confusing when you have object hierarchies / nested tables. I feel like json5 is probably the best option at this point.