Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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Yaml is not good for configuration files because it is not easily human-editable. It seems "easy" but meaningful whitespace is a cluster-fck.

Edit: I have been looking for reasonable configuration file formats for a while. Json actually has pretty bad human-readability at any scale because of its quoted key-values. Yaml is easily readable but when a user tries to change anything, things go to hell. The humble ini-file has won so far. It's limited and not fully standardized but it is human readable and human writable. I'd love see something better but human readability/writable is going trump all sorts of cleverness.

Edit2: From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML "The specific number of spaces in the indentation is unimportant as long as parallel elements have the same left justification and the hierarchically nested elements are indented further."

Yeah, a user of your software is going to be able to understand when they mess up on that rule, riiiight. Screw Yaml.

I rolled my own format specifically for configuration. No significant whitespace, delimiters may dangle, and the parser implementation can be configured to accept very high ambiguity(including, if desired, mixtures of sequence and key-value data).

https://github.com/triplefox/triad/blob/master/dev/com/ludam...

A "real-world" example https://github.com/triplefox/triad/blob/master/examples/Asse...

  It seems "easy" but meaningful whitespace is a cluster-fck.

Tell that to everyone using Python. If your editor can't handle meaningful whitespace transparently, it sounds like you need a better editor.

Python is a programming language. Worlds of difference there.

you need a better editor

I think you misunderstand the concept of "configuration file". These are not intended for programmers but for users of the program you write.

White complaints about Pythons' meaningful white are still common, programmers can get over that by, indeed, getting a better editor or otherwise wrapping their head around the situation.

But end-users can't be expected to have this kind of sophistication. Explaining to someone while things they can't see have made their program usable is no fun.

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