Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

Re:Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language by chipotle_coyote on Friday July 13, 2018 @02:44PM (#17525618)

I think you're focusing on TOML's weakest case here. I think for a lot of configuration files, TOML is going to be easier to read and write. Personally, I'd rather have a configuration file that looks like this:

    [site]
    name = "My Great Website"
    url = "https://example.com"
    author = "Watts Martin"
    email = "[email protected]"
    links = [
      { name = "tom", url = "http://tom.example.com" },
      { name = "bob", url = "http://bob.example.com" }
    ]

    [database]
    server = "localhost"
    username = "dbuser"
    password = "dbpassword"

Than one that looks like this:

    {
      "site": {
        "name": "My Great Website",
        "url": "https://example.com",
        "author": "Watts Martin",
        "email": "[email protected]",
        "links": [
          { "name": "tom", "url": "http://tom.example.com" },
          { "name": "bob", "url": "http://bob.example.com" }
        ]
      },
      "database": {
        "server": "localhost",
        "username": "dbuser",
        "password": "dbpassword"
      }
    }

Semantically, I just find the first one clearer and more intuitive. (The links are really only the dubious part.)

The equivalent YAML doesn't look bad:

    site:
      name: My Great Website
      url: 'https://example.com'
      author: Watts Martin
      email: [email protected]
      links:
        - name: tom
          url: 'http://tom.example.com'
        - name: bob
          url: 'http://bob.example.com'
    database:
      server: localhost
      username: dbuser
      password: dbpassword

...but the significant whitespace makes it somewhat more fragile, particularly in those pesky links.

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Re:Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language by mlthoughts2018 on Friday July 13, 2018 @08:25PM (#17527962)

Actually, even here in your extended example, the JSON is the easiest to read. For durable files that will be read much more than written, saving a few newlines or keystrokes is super irrelevant, but JSON gives such explicit understanding of the data structures and nesting, which IMO is really confusing and hard to understand in Toml.

I can agree Toml is sometimes better than YAML, but I cannot agree it is better than JSON. For me JSON is so simple, so easy to read, it has the nice feature of preventing comments and multi-line strings to keep things extremely simple and to enforce that documentation about the values in the file has to be located outside the file, as it absolutely should (documentation should be at the site that uses the config/param file, not inside it).

Plus, I find JSON indentation to be a real joy to assist with reading and seeing the nested structure. That indentation is optional in Toml, but I think pretty much always the use of that indentation ought to be enforced as a convention for people using Toml. Lacking the indentation is really not good for config / parameter files.

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