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In contrast, JSON is super intuitive and basically self documenting.

Personally I've found the exact opposite when dealing with 'normal' people. Most people can get basic YAML, but unless they're a programmers (or at least know how to program) most people fail miserably at writing JSON by hand.



I agree with this. Our biz guys have to edit JSON config files regularly, and they're limited to basically just copying/pasting lines from existing files and editing the values. When they need to be able to do more, we end up building a UI for it and either storing the config elsewhere or writing the code to manage persisting their changes to the config.


See how much fun these people have trying to figure out why their application crashes because they put a tab instead of spaces into the YAML file.


We use a YAML linter before attempting to load the file. Provides detailed feedback to the user: "Tab found at line 17, column 23"

Also detects repeated hash keys. This is a very good compromise between user-friendliness and machine-friendly specification and serialization.

Thank you very much for YAML! It is a critical user-interceptable interchange mechanism at several companies that I have worked at.


JSON has too many rules regarding comma placement.




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