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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15091426
Mick Stute
Programming for 35+ yearsFeatured on ForbesUpvoted by
Janko Jerinic , Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services (2022-present) and
Hubert Taler , Software engineer and project leaderAuthor has 902 answers and 5.8M answer viewsUpdated 8y
This was mine:
I was hired by a psychologist to fix a program that seemed to have "strange output" written by one of his ex-grad students. It was a program that reads a data file, asks about 50 questions, does some calculations, and comes up with some score based on this PhD's research. It's on a research 3B2 at the university. He demonstrates the program and sure enough there seemed to be strange flashing words on the screen when it moves from question to question, and they don't seem nice. I agree to do it, should be pretty straightforward, so he'll pay me by the hour to determine how big the fix is and then we'll agree to a fee.
As a data format, yaml is extremely complicated and it has many footguns. In this post I explain some of those pitfalls by means of an example, and I suggest a few simpler and safer yaml alternatives.