YAML: My new best friend

I was introduced to YAML, YAML Ain’t Markup Language, via Ruby where it’s part of the standard library. YAML is really great for saving stuff from your program in a human readable / editable text format that’s also easy to parse with a computer. It’s remarkable how well YAML succeeds on both fronts. Config files, object serialization, you name it.

I assumed YAML was a Ruby thing, but in fact excellent YAML libraries are available for just about every language. And they’re *good*. I installed the Python bindings last week (via Syck and I’m now using it for storing some configuration-like data that I was previously Pickle()ing.

It’s not as language agnostic as XML, of course, but hot damn it’s a pleasure to work with by comparison! YAML. I love it!