From: Piotr Szotkowski <chastell@...>
Date: 2011-03-16T00:06:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Understanding YAML and this practice in general

Fily Salas:

> I now have a better idea as to what YAML does and its big
> plus, it basically makes the store objects human readable,
> even though I still don't know have a clear picture as
> to where or how this will be used later, but I guess the
> answer will come later when I gain more experience.

Example: I wrote a simple email signature randomiser¹ so
that my email signatures are picked at random from a given
pool (this email is to ruby-talk, so the one below is picked
from the ones that are both technical and in English).

I could store the signature database in an RDBMS, but that
would be an overkill; all I need is a simple command-line
program that reads the signatures from a file, selects those
matching the requirements and then picks one from them.

Without YAML I’d have to create a storage format that takes into
account the signature’s body, author, subject, source and tags
– with YAML I just serialise the signature object and I’m done.
On the flip side, if I even find a typo in a signature, I can
easily directly edit the YAML file² and be done with it.

¹ https://github.com/chastell/signore
² https://github.com/chastell/dotfiles/blob/master/.local/share/signore/signatures.yml

— Piotr Szotkowski
-- 
The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.
                                         [Douglas Crockford on JSON vs XML]