Not always, but the second you use anchor/references you have sold your soul in a Faustian bargain of convenience.
On the alignment chart of data/markup formats:
- lawful good: JSON
- lawful neutral: TOML
- lawful evil: XML
- neutral good: reStructuredText
- true neutral: HTML
- neutral evil: LaTeX
- chaotic good: YAML
- chaotic neutral: Markdown
- chaotic evil: xlsx/csv
Nah this chart needs fixing. Raw html is not neutral. And how is html neutral but xml evil. And who is writing restructured text outside of python?
Also where’s regex? Though that’s so troublesome because it’s a process encoded in a string, not really a structure with debatably obnoxious syntax… hmm
I honestly think that JSON and YAML should be swapped due to YAML’s strict indentation rules whereas you can just pack an entire JSON object on one line.
I think yaml’s need for indentation alone makes it chaotic evil. I’ve seen so many people struggle with the indentation than they really need to it’s not fun. Especially problematic with large configuration files.
JSON is easy to unpack with tools like jq or whatever.
There are 6 different combinations of “interpret multiline whitespace” character patterns. There are three types of single-line strings, and if you use “Yes” or “No” the data gets type cast.
Yaml is chaotic.
Oh this is a good point - the syntax error on line one has ruined several productive days.
Of course the tool would happily prettify it for me, but it has to be valid json. Which I think would make it more enjoyable if it said in that message “Good luck, we’re counting on you.”
Also JSON has no comments. Which is great for me because I hate documenting my work, but it’s still annoying.
