Constant erosion of data formats into the shittiest DSLs in existence is annoying. "Oh, hey, instead of writing Python, how about you write in
* YAML, with magical keywords that turn data into conditions/commands * template language for the YAML in places when that isn't enough * ....Python, because you need to eventually write stuff that ingests the above either way .... ansible is great isn't it?"
... and for some reason others decide "YES THIS IS AWESOME" and we now have a bunch of declarative YAML+template garbage.
> There was a thread here the other day about using Sqlite as an interchange format to REDUCE complexity. Look, I love Sqlite, as an application specific data-store. But much like XML it has a ton of capabilities, which is good for a data-store, but awful for an interchange format with multiple producers/consumers with their own ideas.
It's just a bunch of records put in tables with pretty simple data types. And it's trivial to convert into other formats while being compact and queryable on its own. So as far as formats go, you could do a whole lot worse.
Basic dicts, arrays and templates might be the killer feature set for declarative data languages. If everyone coalesces to those eventually, it means there's something to it.
One issue with SQLite is that it's _not_ rewritten every time like JSON and XML, so if you forget to vacuum it or roundtrip it through SQL, you can easily leak deleted data in the binary file.