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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

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benatkin·

I disagree. TOML is terrible at handling nested data.

Check this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523194

I don't see Kubernetes switching to TOML anytime soon!

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There may be no nested data in his use case. There’s no single correct answer here.

Too YAGNI for me.

I have nesting up to three levels deep. I use inline tables^ for the many innermost (or other few-element) tables. It's never seemed excessively verbose.

^https://toml.io/en/v1.0.0#inline-table

A bit later you see [fruits.physical]

Even XML doesn't make you repeat the higher level keys!

Also agree, I find toml way less readable than yaml for lots of data structures

I feel like if you have data so nested that TOML is a problem then your schema is a problem/you should just be using a script

I think the "right" choice is HCL

It's plenty easy to convert YAML to JSON and use it in Terraform :)

https://www.terraform.io/docs/language/syntax/json.html

Why convert when HCL is superior to YAML and JSON?

It isn't. YAML and JSON are much more proven than HCL. HCL is used for some relatively small products. Just making something more complicated doesn't make it better.

Proven in what sense? Several implementations are broken are incorrect. HCL is used in very large products as well. Just because it isn't the majority currently doesn't mean that it isn't a worthy choice. HCL isn't more complicated if used as an alternative to YAML or JSON, in fact, I would argue that it is simpler. It bridges the pros of YAML and JSON combined, and addresses the nested complexity of TOML. It really is IMO the best, but you of course are free to share a different opinion. However, I would encourage you to actually try it out and re-evaluate.

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