I'll take limited YAML over JSON any day of the week for things that might be edited by hand. The cleaner diffs when appending to a list alone are worth it.

True, but when the YAML file gets long and complicated, such as when a kubernetes YAML spec, it becomes difficult to figure out what indentation different items need to be at and you end up needing to use tools other than just your laptop: https://twitter.com/Caged/status/1039937162769096704?s=19

Hah, I can see my own old response to that tweet.

Anyways, as horrifying as it is, that's actually an argument in favor of XML. After all, would being lost in {} be that much better than indents? You'd still be scrambling to figure out how deep you are in a deeply nested object.

The obnoxious repetition of xml's closing elements actually helps here since you can see what object you're closing.

...

But I hate XML.

At this point I'm fantasizing about using heavily-sandboxed Lua and going fully Turing-complete so when your files are getting horribly complicated you can start doing some minimal reuse.

I guess the temptation would be to say that it is in fact a hard problem. But then I look at something like HOCON which basically solves all the problems with YAML, you can understand it after about half an hour of reading, but somehow it's a fraction as popular as yaml or json. Maybe it just lacks marketing muscle or a really visible project.

YAML is all nice and dandy when the file you're writing is relatively simple. When what you're doing expands beyond a single key-value data structure, things rapidly take a turn for the tragic. JSON is fine, and I can live with XML, but save me from YAML.