If not using any esoteric features, it's more human readable (imo), easier to write, can have comments and has some useful features like different kind of multi-line values. JSON is valid YAML, by the way.
replyBecause YAML is the worst config format, except for all the others.
replyhttps://opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-05-21_in-defense-of-ya...
> less human-readable version of JSON
replyPlease provide an example, how YAML can be less readable than JSON. I struggle to think of any.
Indentation based structure isn't really a good thing in my eyes, where the format of the document encodes semantic meaning. With JSON, you can display it how you want, and because it's bracketed it will still encode the same data.
replyAlso I really don't like the hyphen notation... This is very unreadable to me:
- a
- b: c
- - dYAML:
reply - - "hello"
-
- "hello"
[
[
"hello"
]
]
[["hello"]]
I still prefer ini files for configuration. Easier to grep and sed.
replyYou can get a bit more if you use TOML over INI... it's similar at a baseline, but still a bit more rich for advanced configuration than INI is.
replyThey work wonderfully until you need to do anything more advanced than a key-value store.
replyMy belief is that anything that requires more than that are hiding the fact that what they truly need is a DSL. Instead they force you to write AST (ansible, github actions, docker compose,…)
replyPeople use YAML because a bunch of other people use YAML. Whatever its warts, there's no use resisting it.
replyThere’s lots of overengineered features in YAML that are problematic, but at a high level, it’s much, much more human-friendly than JSON. And if you love JSON, good news: it’s 100% valid YAML.
reply> it just seems like a more overcomplicated
replyBecause people LOVE overcomplicated shit. You see it happen everywhere.
I don't think that's it
replyBecause as long as you stay away from anchors and inline JSON, YAML is a perfectly workable, structured, human-readable format that supports comments.
reply