The Norway Problem
The world <i>desperately</i> needs a replacement for YAML.<p>TOML is fine for configuration, but not an adequate solution for representing arbitrary data.<p>JSON is a fine data exchange format, but is not particularly human-friendly, and is especially poor for editable content: Lacks comments, multi-line strings, is far too strict about unimportant syntax, etc.<p>Jsonnet (a derivative of Google's internal configuration language) is very good, but has failed to reach widespread adoption.<p>Cue is a newer Jsonnet-inspired language that ticks a lot of boxes for me (strict, schema support, human-readable, compact), but has not seen wide adoption.<p>Protobuf has a JSON-like text format that's friendlier, but I don't think it's widely adopted, and as I recall, it inherits a lot of Protobufisms.<p>Dhall is interesting, but a bit too complex to replace YAML.<p>Starlark is a neat language, but has the same problem as Dhall. It's essentially a stripped-down Python.<p>Amazon Ion [1] is neat, but I've not seen any adoption outside of AWS.<p>NestedText [2] looks promising, but it's just a Python library.<p>StrictYAML [3] is a nice attempt at cleaning up YAML. But we need a new language with wide adoption across many popular languages, and this is Python only.<p>Any others?<p>[1] <a href="https://amzn.github.io/ion-docs/" rel="nofollow">https://amzn.github.io/ion-docs/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://nestedtext.org/" rel="nofollow">https://nestedtext.org/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/</a>