YAML? That's Norway Problem (lab174.com)

For yaml in the context of Ansible, this was recently fixed a little while back in v2.19.

They got more strict about booleans. For those who need/want the old behavior, ALLOW_BROKEN_CONDITIONALS can be set in the ansible.cfg or `is truthy` can be used for python-like version, but it becomes explicit vs being implied.

Was backward compatibility the main reason YAML kept these implicit conversions for so long, or was there a stronger usability argument originally?

YAML is the worst format.

You are literally one missing tab away from breaking your entire configuration file. Yet the industry keeps pushing it for the sake of “simplicity” - for small configurations sure, it’s fine, but many hundred lines of config entries? Good luck fixing it, if something goes wrong.

I still can’t get why software engineers suddenly started to hate XML.

Really? Putting quotes around strings is called escaping now?

    One workaround is to escape the string, like this:
    
    countries:
      - DE
      - FR
      - "NO"
      - PL
      - RO

Comon, it’s 2026, yeah yaml’s design can lead to odd type casts, but a whole essay on this? Keep it under 140 chars pls.

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Somehow my brain finds YAML hard to parse. JSON is easy but ugly. Lately I’ve just been using Python code in a module to initialize config settings. Initially it was just a lazy way to get started, but having the flexibility of an actual language is great when things evolve over time.

I'd say cue is nicer, but the tooling available is even less mature.

OP mentions backward compatibility and popular YAML libraries as the reason why the "Norway problem" is still an issue, but I'm a little bit doubtful about this explanation.

It's been 10 years, if not more, since I've seen YAML configuration files using "yes/no" or "on/off". Even back in the day, these alternative boolean values were never extremely popular: the community more or less settled on true/false.

The libraries issue is real, but my issue is with the word "popular". These are libraries that used to be very popular, and kinda stuck on as the default, even though most of them semi-abandoned and (at least in my opinion) shouldn't really be used by any new project.

PyYAML's last major release was in 2021, and it's only seen security fixes since then. Even the last major release in 2021 was only a major release becasue Python 2.7 support was removed. Before that there were some API changes in 5.1 released in 2019 (only because the PyYAML defaults have been ridiculously insecure and everyone has been complaining about this for years), and between 2008 and 2019 there were barely any worthwhile changes. tl;dr: PyYAML has been in maintenance mode since 2008.

Libyaml (which PyYAML is based on) hasn't seen a new release since 2020, and while it introduced some YAML 1.2 support, the development pace on this library has been glacial since 2009. Between 2009 and 2020, the project had 3 commits touching actual code per year on average, and since then the number went down to 1 commit on average.

It's a sad state that both libyaml and PyYAML are part of the official YAML project, but hasn't budged forward in supporting YAML 1.2. There is something to be said about open-source project being feature complete and requiring only light maintenance, but if they don't support the latest major YAML spec version that was released all the way back in 2009, I don't think we can call them feature-complete.

There are newer libraries out there for all these languages that support 1.2, are more well-maintained and often offer better and safer API, like libfyaml for C, yaml-cpp for C++, ruaemel for Python and goccy/yaml for Go (not the same as the original go-yaml, does support most of YAML 1.2, but has strangely chosen to keep the "Norway booleans").

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Reminds me of some enum at my current employer, where all the US states have 2 letter codes, except Idaho is spelled out fully.

I find JSON better for serialization/deserialization. It's a bit tedious to write by hand but who writes JSON by hand?

This was probably the best written text I've read this year.

I wish there were a "strict" yaml. Another subset a la json, where you don't have nonsense like no === false, but "no" does not, but you also get the block style which to me is easier to read and write. I don't mind requiring quotes for strings. Modern IDEs make it easy enough and it removes ambiguity.