[Catalyst] YAML vs. *

[Matt S Trout]

Kiki wrote:
> A. Pagaltzis wrote:
>>  And it’s very easy to figure out what goes where just
>> by looking at the format; no manual or cheat sheet necessary.
>>   
> 
> It is to me too after years of editing apache config files. The first
> months of dealing with it however were hell, esp. in regard to directive
> and options overriding.

Yeah, although that's more down to the way apache processes it than the syntax 
itself.

> The point is any sufficiently complex data structure will be confusing
> no matter what format it is expressed as. Once you get familiar with it
> (the data structure, not the format), you will be able to deal with the
> format as well (YMMV, though).

Yep. Complex configs are always a bit confusing. Config::General doesn't fix 
this, it just seems (at least to me) to suck less than the available alternatives.

>>> Well, the "perl way" would be Data::Dumper + eval in a Safe
>>> compartment. It's indent insensitive, doesn't look like XML
>>> (which is my pet peeve regarding C::G) and instantly
>>> readable/writable if you know Perl.
>>>     
>> Suffers from the same problems as JSON and YAML: hard to write
>> for non-programmers. Also hard to read, like JSON.
>>   
> I don't see why writing YAML would get suddenly easier if you learned a
> programming language. It's a matter of conventions. If the user is
> inexperienced enough to really mess up indentation (after being warned
> about it), chances are he'll forget to close tags, misspell option names
> or set creative option values like: "Allow from all my friends" or "Deny
> from Russia" [with love] ;) too.

I definitely prefer JSON to YAML for that sort of side. JSON is still 
fundamentally a structured data format, not a config file format, but it's 
more explicit than YAML and I can't fuck myself up with whitespace errors, 
which is bloody handy.

I used .json for my conf files fairly religiously before ConfigLoader 
supported Config::General.

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