so i actually happen to have a fairly unique use case where we simultaneously want to have the format be easy to type & perceive by humans *and* be structured enough to, say, have references to other blocks in the file / in other files, do block level templating / replacement, and the like (working on a very elaborate prompt / templating / other things system for agents/llms, so being able to type text by hand is nice AND having a data spec as a result is nice)... i already did it originally in YAML, and ... it was an experience to be sure. i think i probably have spent about as much time mucking about in the YAML spec as damn near anyone (surely less than Ingy though haha). ANYWAY, i looked high and low and i gotta say that those requirements are actually fairly hard to meet outside of XML. everything else under the sun is basically text or basically data. there are a couple clever markdown variants that are kinda nice, but you can't really link to an arbitrary location elsewhere without having to modify that location too, which is not gonna work. am i a "fan" of how finnicky the syntax is in weird corner cases? no, because i'm not smart enough to even know how to complain about it right-- i'm sure most of it does make sense. but there is definitely some subtle brilliance going on w/ this YAMLscript thing, and not just because of my stockholm syndrome or because it's basis on clojure.
Yes as a Clojurist I gag at the language... but... given it parses current YAML and with the bindings from other languages... it's pretty cool! Well done!
so i actually happen to have a fairly unique use case where we simultaneously want to have the format be easy to type & perceive by humans *and* be structured enough to, say, have references to other blocks in the file / in other files, do block level templating / replacement, and the like (working on a very elaborate prompt / templating / other things system for agents/llms, so being able to type text by hand is nice AND having a data spec as a result is nice)... i already did it originally in YAML, and ... it was an experience to be sure. i think i probably have spent about as much time mucking about in the YAML spec as damn near anyone (surely less than Ingy though haha). ANYWAY, i looked high and low and i gotta say that those requirements are actually fairly hard to meet outside of XML. everything else under the sun is basically text or basically data. there are a couple clever markdown variants that are kinda nice, but you can't really link to an arbitrary location elsewhere without having to modify that location too, which is not gonna work. am i a "fan" of how finnicky the syntax is in weird corner cases? no, because i'm not smart enough to even know how to complain about it right-- i'm sure most of it does make sense. but there is definitely some subtle brilliance going on w/ this YAMLscript thing, and not just because of my stockholm syndrome or because it's basis on clojure.
Yes as a Clojurist I gag at the language... but... given it parses current YAML and with the bindings from other languages... it's pretty cool! Well done!