Draft PEP on RSON configuration file format

[Philip Semanchuk]

On Mar 1, 2010, at 3:08 PM, Paul Rubin wrote:

> Patrick Maupin <pmaupin at gmail.com> writes:
>> One of my complaints.  If you had read the document you would have
>> seen others.  I actually have several complaints about YAML, but I
>> tried to write a cogent summary.
>
> Yaml sucks, but seems to have gotten some traction regardless.
> Therefore the Python principle of "there should be one and only one
> obvious way to do it" says: don't try to replace the existing thing if
> your new thing is only slightly better.  Just deal with the existing
> thing's imperfections or make improvements to it.  If you can make a
> really powerful case that your new thing is 1000x better than the old
> thing, that's different, but I don't think we're seeing that here.
>
> Also, XML is used for pretty much everything in the Java world.  It
> sucks too, but it is highly standardized, it observably gets the job
> done, there are tons of structure editors for it, etc.  Frankly
> I'd rather have stayed with it than deal with Yaml.
>
> There are too many of these damn formats.  We should ban all but one  
> of
> them (I don't much care which one).  And making even more of them is  
> not
> the answer.


I dunno, times change, needs change. We must invent new tools, be  
those computer languages or data formats. Otherwise we'd still be  
programming in COBOL and writing fixed-length records to 12 inch  
floppies.*

If Mr. Maupin was a giant corporation trying to shove a proprietary  
format down our collective throats, I might object to RSON. But he's  
not. He appears willing for it live or die on its merits, so I say  
good luck to him. I don't want or need it, but someone else might.

Cheers
Philip


* You had floppies? Bleddy luxury! We wrote our data on wood pulp we'd  
chewed ourselves and dried into paper, using drops of our own blood to  
represent 1s and 0s.