Yet another “brilliant” scheme from a cryptobro. Naturally this caused a gold-rush for scammers who outsourced random people via the gig economy to open PRs for this yml file (example)

  • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    Despite my love of yaml. I actually think he has a small point with unquoted strings. I teach students and see their struggles. Bash also does unquoted strings and basically all students go years and years without realizing

    cat --help
    cat "--help"
    # ^ same thing
    
    cat *
    cat "*"
    # ^ not same thing
    
    cat $thing
    cat "$thing"
    # ^ similar but not the same 
    

    To know the difference between special and normal-but-no-quotes you have to know literally every special symbol. And, for example, its rare to realize the -- in --help, isn’t special at a language level, its only special at a convention level.

    Same thing can happen in yaml files, but actually a little worse I’d say. In bash all the “special” things are at least symbols. But in yaml there are more special cases. Imagine editing this kind of a list:

    js_keywords:
    - if
    - else
    - while
    - break
    - continue
    - import
    - from
    - default
    - class
    - const
    - var
    - let
    - new
    - async
    - function
    - undefined
    - null
    - true
    - false
    - Nan
    - Infinity
    

    Three of those are not strings. Syntax highlighting can help (which is why I don’t think its a real issue). But still “why are three not strings? Well … just because”. AKA there isn’t a syntax pattern, there’s just a hardcoded list of names that need to be memorized. What is actually challeging is, unless students start with a proper yaml tutorial, or see examples of quotes in the config, its not obvious that quotes will solve the problem (students think "true" behaves like "\"true\""). So even when they see true is highlighted funny, they don’t really know what to do about it. I’ve seem some try stuff like \true.

    Still doesn’t mean yaml is bad, every language has edge cases.

    • theherk@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

      While the subjective assessment that quote handling in yaml is worse than bash is understandable, it is really just two of many many cases where quotes complicate things. And for a pretty good reason. They are used to isolate strings in many languages, even prose. They, therefore, always get special handling in lexical analysis. Understanding which languages use single quotes, double quotes, backticks, heredocs, etc and when to use them is really just part of the game or the struggle I guess.