Sometimes that’s part of the issue (or the whole deal), but sometimes it’s not even that.
Sometimes it’s that someone asked something difficult and elaborate to answer, which has been answered a ton of times, and it’s tedious to answer again and again. But if someone answers with misinformation or even straight FUD, then one needs to feel the urge to correct that to prevent misinformation.
I suffered that with questions in r/QtFramework. Tons of licensing questions, repeated over and over, from people who have not bothered to read a bit about such a well known and popular license as LGPL. Then someone who cares little for the nuance answers something heavy handed, and paints a wrong picture. Then I can’t let the question pass. I need to correct the shitty answer. :-(
I would say that if someone asks a difficult question it’s often difficult because it’s very general, so you don’t have any specific point to answer that you know will satisfy the person asking.
On the other hand, if someone is writing misinformation then they provide specific statements which still may be difficult to correct but you have those anchor points you can refer to.
So I guess the thing here is that if someone, after asking a question, writes a BS answer they actually refine their question and narrow its scope, thus making it easier to answer.
I usually see broad questions about rather simple things unanswered, but very specific yet difficult questions answered
My coworkers had a hard time picking resturaunts, so I started recommending McDonald’s for work parties, and then everyone else started chiming in with actually good ideas.
That’s more of a weakness of yaml. There’s so many ways to specify the exact same thing. Not exactly what you need for configuration files maintained by multiple people. It easily becomes an big incoherent mess.
In JSON the default way is the only way. Nice and coherent.
I agree that YAML is painful and it really seems like it’s had a lot of feature creep.
JSON is painful in its own way too, though. There’s a lot of syntax noise from things like braces, quotation marks, etc, so it’s easy to make a mistake. Regular JSON doesn’t allow trailing commas.
YAML tried to solve some of that, and did succeed in some ways, but introduced its own issues.
TOML seems great to me, but maybe it has its own issues. TOML actually has defined data formats for things like dates (both offset and local) and times, which is missing from both JSON and YAML so every app ends up doing it its own way.
My problem with yaml is if you truncate it at any random spot, there’s a high likelihood it’s still valid yaml. I don’t like the idea that things can continue without even knowing there’s a problem. The single opening and closing curly braces enclosing a json object is all it takes to at least know you didn’t receive the entire message. Toml has the same issue. I’ll stick with json when it makes sense.
Quite like YAML, XML has too many stuff in it. While a lot of parsers are not standard compliant and safe, if there’s any chance the stuff you include on your code can evolve into a fully featured parser, including it is something to avoid.
There is this language called KDL that looks interesting.
Ever tried NestedText? It’s like basic YAML but everything is a string (types are up to the code that ingests it), and you never ever need to escape a character.
I’ve got too many consumers that I don’t control which dictate their input formats. And to be quite honest, “types are up to the code that ingests it” sounds like a huge negative to me.
Ah, well I love that policy (types being in code, not configs). FWIW I sometimes use it as a hand-edited document, with a small type-specifying file, to generate json/yaml/toml for other programs to load.
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