Brief history of YAML:

“Oh no! All of these configuration file formats are complicated. I want to make things simpler!”

(Years go by)

“…I have made things more complicated, haven’t I?”

YAML is generally good if it’s used for what it was originally designed for (relatively short data files, e.g. configuration data). Problem is, people use it for so much more. (My personal favourite pain example: i18n stuff in Ruby on Rails. YAML language files work for small apps, but when the app grows, so does the pain.)

Yep and a lot of people get it wrong. It’s not the “Sonic the Hedgehog protein” but “Sonic hedgehog protein”, as in hedgehog protein that is Sonic. It’s clearly distinct in meaning, and therefore completely different. As the original discoverer of the gene put it, “original protein name, do not steal”.

I’m from Finland. This is how it usually goes in the winter:

During the 2 hours of daylight we get at this latitude:

• Ooooooh this is pretty
• Bet I can get some nice photographs
• …or I would, if the sky wasn’t overcast goddamn it

Other times:

• Rummaging through the closet for wool socks and more clothing
• Put on the headphones, hit the metal music collection on my Nokia, and face the Darkness with a grim stare
• Would hit the beer, but not in this economy

Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.

Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I’m not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.

/serious Well, yes, most APIs are meant for system-to-system interaction, that’s kind of a given. But since this particular API is clearly meant for human-to-system interaction, returning a human-readable response is adequate. Yes, a better design would probably allow the client to specify additional parameters about the desired response.

/back-to-jokes Yeah, well this kind of sums up most of my job applications. I send an application and the recruiting people are all like “OK”.