Rod Johnson:

I’m not against YAML, just against abuse of YAML. I want to help prevent people abusing YAML and being cruel to themselves and their coworkers in the process.

YAML has bitten me once or twice over the years, but I am not repulsed by it as many folks seem to be.

YAML’s strength is as a structured data format. Yes, it has issues. Whitespace is a minefield. Its syntax is surprisingly complex. It has gotchas: “Anyone who uses YAML long enough will eventually get burned when attempting to abbreviate Norway.” But YAML is human readable and supports comments: two key benefits that drive its popularity.

If JSON supported comments it may have killed YAML by now. But alas… Rod makes a good defense of the format for certain uses.