VSCode is Electron, i.e. a webpage, so it’s not hugely surprising that they opted for the natively supported JavaScript Object Notation. And also shows that they don’t care for using the right tool for the job to begin with.

Personally, I much prefer TOML over YAML, because it does not have significant whitespace, and because you can read the spec in a reasonable amount of time. It just has so much less complexity, while still covering the vast majority of use-cases perfectly well.

They’re not supposed to contain data, but some parsers will allow you to access what’s written into comments. And so, of course, someone made use of that and I had to extract what was encoded basically like that:

<!--
    Host: toaster,
    Location: moon,
-->
<data>Actual XML follows...</data>

My best guess is that they added this data into comments rather than child nodes or attributes, because they were worried some of the programs using this XML would not be able to handle an extension of the format.

We just document that this is how you write the config file:

[network]
bind.host = "127.0.0.1"
bind.port = 1234

# etc.

And that seems straightforward enough. Yeah, technically users can opt to use inline tables or raw strings or whatever, but they don’t have to.

I can kind of understand it after having to work with an XML file where users encoded data into comments for no good reason. But yeah, it does make JSON awkward for lots of potential use-cases.

I don’t feel like it will stray very far from what’s dubbed “TOML 0.1” in the meme. Yes, it has inline tables and as of TOML 1.1, they’re allowed to span multiple lines, so it’s technically not anymore illegal to do what’s in the meme. But all things considered, this is still a miniscule change compared to TOML 1.0.

Well, you can still decide how much of the TOML features you actually use in your specific application. For example, I’m currently involved in two projects at $DAYJOB where we read TOML configurations and we don’t make use of the inline tables that OP memes about in either of them.

Ultimately, the big advantage of TOML over INI is that it standardizes all kinds of small INI extensions that folks have come up with over the decades. As such, it has a formal specification and in particular only one specification.
You can assume that you can read the same TOML file from two different programming languages, which you cannot just assume for INI.

Well, Wikipedia does say:

The [TOML] project standardizes the implementation of the ubiquitous INI file format (which it has largely supplanted[citation needed]), removing ambiguity from its interpretation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOML

Counterpoints:

• TOML is intended for configuration, not for data serialization, so you shouldn’t be sending it over the wire in all too crazy ways anyways.
• Most protocols will have a built-in way of knowing when the whole content has been transferred, typically by putting a content length into the header.
• Having to wait until the closing } or ] can also be a disadvantage of JSON, since you cannot stream it, i.e. start processing the fields/elements before the whole thing has arrived. (You probably still don’t want to use TOML for that, though. JSONL, CSV or such are a better idea.)

Well, TOML is essentially just an extension of the INI format (which helped its adoption quite a bit, since you could just fork INI parsers for all kinds of programming languages).

And then, yeah, flattening everything is kind of baked into INI, where it arguably made more sense.
Although, I do also feel like non-techies fare better with flat files, since they don’t have to understand where into the structure they have to insert the value. They just need find the right “heading” to put the line under, which is something they’re familiar with.

They serve largely different use-cases. JSON is good for serializing data. TOML is good for configuration.

(too hard for me)

It’s kind of bad for scripts, where it can be either annoying or genuinely problematic, when your script hangs on a password prompt. You typically do want it to just fail right away, because if you have monitoring, then you’ll be able to spot it failing.

These days, it is (largely reliably) possible to detect whether a command is being run interactively or as part of an unattended script, so you do see some commands that trigger a sudo password prompt only for interactive use, for example systemctl does this. But this adds quite a bit of complexity to each individual program, so it isn’t really something that’s going to be implemented universally.

I also have to say that systemctl kind of gets on my tits when it does that, because it throws up a GUI dialog for grabbing the password, which is quite jarring.

Most developers I’ve looked at would happily just paste the curl|bash thing into the terminal.

I mean, I typically see it used for installing applications, and so long as TLS is used for the download, I’m still not aware of a good reason why you should check the Bash script in particular in that case, since the application itself could just as well be malware.

Of course, it’s better to check the Bash script than to not check it, but at that point we should also advise to download the source code for the application, review it and then compile it yourself.
At some point, you just have to bite the bullet and I have not yet seen a good argument why the Bash script deserves special treatment here…

Having said that, for cases where you’re not installing an application, yeah, reviewing the script allows you to use it, without having to trust the source to the same degree as you do for installing an application.

Man, I do love when Wikipedia is Just Stating Facts™ and yet reads like the sassiest gossip, because reality is just so dumb^[1].

Ivanka Trump [Trump’s daughter with his first wife] has been described as the inspiration of Mar-a-Lago face.

Kristi Noem, Melania Trump [Trump’s third wife], and Kimberly Guilfoyle have been described as having Mar-a-Lago face.

He does like to talk about wanting sex with Ivanka, so I guess, that tracks.

Melissa Rein Lively, a MAGA political worker, was reported […] to reject “any idea of submission or constraint” associated with Mar-a-Lago face, and that “no one forces me to do two hours of sport a day, to go to the hairdresser every three and a half weeks, to get my nails and eyebrows done, to get Botox.”

Blink twice, if you’re being forced to say this…? Seriously, why would you list a bunch of unpleasant aspects, if you’re trying to make the point that you don’t mind it?

One thing that will become important pretty quick if you continue making these scripts is that it’s almost always better to wrap your variables in quotes - so it becomes yt-dlp -x “$a”.

Oh man, this reminds me of the joke that any program that’s more complex than Hello World has bugs – and folks still don’t even agree how to spell “Hello, World!”.

Of course, Bash is a particular minefield in this regard…

Is it? I work in tech and I would have not a single fucking clue…

Man, you have a lot of confidence in your ability to tell Rainmeter apart from Conky, Eww or the like, from just a handful of pixels…

Yeah, so many people swear by mechanical keyboards with a huge amount of key travel, and I never see it discussed that the key travel itself is problematic.

To be fair, Sarah Bond was in a similar position and is a woman of color, too.

Yeah, always found that interesting, how a talent can play out in two ways:

1. You get feedback from the outside that your talent is exceptional and you show it to everyone.
2. Or you don’t get that feedback, you kind of just assume that everyone is as good as you are, and that your talent is not worth showing. By not showing it, you continue to not get feedback on it and may not realize for quite some time.