JSON

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data-interchange format which is mainly pitched as being easy for machines to parse and generate. It also gets used a lot by human eyeballs for configuration files. Besides being significantly less human-friendly than, say, YAML^ᛦ, there’s a vast pile of tooling to make it less of a nightmare to deal with. jq is most of the kit you need to deal with it as a consumer, so I highly recommend it. As a producer, I’d be happier with Dhall^ᛦ.

2020-10-11

Dhall^ᛦ
- Dhall is a programmable configuration language which aims to enhance or replace existing config formats like JSON^ᛦ and YAML^ᛦ by adding first-class functions, static types, and native imports.
YAML^ᛦ
- YAML (a recursive abbreviation denoting “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”) bills itself as a human friendly data serialization standard for all programming languages. In my experience, it’s mostly popular in the Python^ᛦ ecosystem. It’s a relatively pleasant language for fairly straightforward configuration languages (Ansible^ᛦ, in particular), though its use in tools like Cloud Custodian^ᛦ leads one to lean heavily on some of the wacky side features in the YAML spec. Pleasantly, there’s a bijection between YAML and JSON^ᛦ structures, so there’s plenty of tooling allowing a user to work in their preferred language and convert for the benefit of picky programs. All told, though, I’d much prefer everyon just use Dhall^ᛦ since it’s stricly better (if a bit less ergonomic on day one).
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