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Comment by throwawaaarrgh | Hacker News Reader

> This assumption was discovered

Did you read the spec? Or did you just start using it assuming you knew how it worked?

Whatever generated that clearly wasn't serializing its data using a library, or it would have converted the type into the correct format.

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Could be more specific about what part of the 60+ page YAML spec you have in mind?

https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2

> Whatever generated that clearly wasn't serializing its data using a library

Wow, you couldn't ask for a stronger condemnation than that for YAML as a configuration language. "You clearly weren't using a library to write your config file".

In the world I live in, config file formats exist to be written and read by humans. Serialization formats exist to be generated by libraries.

Not to mention YAML itself purports to be human friendly. Otherwise the config files would have been JSON or something else.

There's always an assumption that if you do things perfect you'll never run into issues.

But it's not unreasonable to expect 07 and 08 to work consistently.

It was somewhere in the middle of a helm chart we imported. So we're building on the shoulders of stuff no one knows how to use.

Yeah, helm is...interesting. it's just a gnarly yaml -> template -> yaml cycle. it's better than nothing for the problem it solves....but god, there's gotta be a better way.

Just use JSON for everything that is supposed to accept YAML, and rely on the fact that the entirety of JSON is somehow a subset of YAML and that most YAML never actually needs the "features" of YAML.

At least with JSON, tooling can help you find invalid syntax in the middle of your file.

And JSON tooling/libraries (compared to YAML tooling/libraries) are usually faster, easier to use, have less bugs and present less incompatibilities between themselves most of the time.

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