Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

This seems... worse?

I can't figure out what's happening here. Is everything just a string? They complain about how YAML handles booleans (fair criticism), however I can't see how NestedText fixes this.

This feels far inferior to TOML (everything NextText does, and much more) or JSON (very unambiguous, works natively in most languages).

I see this a lot in startups and open source projects. They exist solely as a criticism of their competition (which is fair!), but don't work to understand the real problems and fix them in any meaningful way. You can spot them when they talk a lot about what's wrong with the competition ("AWS is too expensive", "YAML is too ambiguous") but never explain their solution.

"It's a complex problem so we just cast everything to a sting and require applications to handle the typing" is what I interpret it as.

Honestly after a few years using YAML you remember to always quote anything you know you need to be a string, and the different multi line types.

An argument against this is "why not just design it to be simpler" — well, then it's less useful in as wide a variety of applications, and stands less chance of actually becoming a standard like JSON or YAML has. And you end up with the XKCD problem.

YAML came in and solved a few of JSON's most glaring problems (multi line and comments) with a usable approach.

This new format seems like it's "YAML, but a little different."

If I wanted to usurp YAML, I'd focus on the greatest pain points for most, whitespace and schema support.

> YAML came in and solved a few of JSON's most glaring problems

AFAIK they were both independently created in 2001 and YAML was not created in response to JSON.

Sadly my comment will not add value to the conversation, but I came to the comments looking to see if someone made the XKCD reference. To my delight, here you are. #927 always delivers - https://xkcd.com/927/

YAML just introduced other problems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com