Rather than a JSON replacement, I like TOML as a YAML replacement. It's a lot simpler, I'm not confused by things not having a preceding dash, indentation isn't significant, etc.
I disagree. TOML is an INI replacement. They both suck at nested structures but are good if you just have a load of top level sections containing simple key-values.
YAML on the other hand is just as good at any nesting depth. I mean it's pretty awful at all depths, but the act of nesting doesn't make it any more awful.
I spent a whole day debugging an issue because an extra - dash in yaml.
I had something like
rules:
- name: Only allow X
- condition: ip=123
The - in front of condition of course makes a new list element. So I now had 2 rules. One with no conditions and a name, and an unnamed one with conditions. Since they are or'ed together everything for some reason I couldn't figure out went through, as I thought I had a single rule..
Yeah I've had this happen to me too. Truly awful format. I think the only reason it has caught on is because it has multiline strings, which are usually not great in other formats. Of course YAML fucks that up too by having a gazillion different kinds of multiline strings, distinguished only by impossible to remember symbols. But it does at least have them.
Yeah I guess we're saying the same thing: TOML as an INI replacement is more of a YAML as an INI replacement. Re: nesting, I think TOML's dotting is pretty elegant as it flattens the nesting you so often need in configs. It took me a while to get used to the double brackets (and it is pretty confusing that you can put them anywhere, not just after their parent section--what are the edge cases that benefit from this...) but now I'm bought in, to the point where I don't know if I've just gotten used to the madness or what. I like that those two things essentially flatten the config--if you were using the new multi-line-inline-tables (from the forthcoming 1.1) you could actually nest things but now I don't know how much I even want that.
