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YAML document from hell (2023)
As a data format, yaml is extremely complicated and it has many footguns. In this post I explain some of those pitfalls by means of an example, and I suggest a few simpler and safer yaml alternatives.
In yaml 1.2 these alternative spellings of the boolean literals are no longer allowed, but they are so pervasive in the wild that a compliant parser would have a hard time reading many documents. What makes this even more insidious is that many dynamically typed applications implicitly convert the number to a string when needed, so your document works fine most of the time, except in some contexts it doesn’t. Hashicorp Configuration Language — I haven’t used HCL extensively enough to have a strong opinion on it, but in the places where I worked with it, the potential for abstraction seemed more limited than what you can achieve with e.g. Nix.
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