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Author Here. My point is not that YAML is a programming language, and that is horrible. Instead, it is used sometimes used to embed a vendor-specific unnamed programming language in, and that is horrible.

People start with some YAML, and everything is fine. Then a simple condition is added, so ok, we are treating code as data, LISP style but in YAML. Then the logic and branching grows, and we introduce templates.

It not that anyone wants to get where we've ended up. It's that each step along the way seems to make sense until you end up trapped in complex templates, and scripts to configure your config and it's too late.

It is a vicious local optimum that everyone keeps falling into.




If you embedded a vendor-specific unnamed programming language in JSON or Dhall or TOML or INI or CSV it would be bad too.


One of those is not like the other. Shall is an actual programming language -- designed purely for configuration.


They are all relatively isomorphic in the structures they produce, so you can layer a terrible language on top of any of them.


"isomorphic in the structures they produce"

That's a function: anything -> text. It doesn't mean anything.

EDIT: Also, I typo'd Shall for Dhall. My bad.




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