Useability is not good

Posted Dec 17, 2025 14:02 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Useability is not good by taladar
Parent article: Conill: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities

Trivial? The "use 'comment' keys" fails in the following ways:

- only a single instance for an entire object
- if you do support multiple, you still need to manually avoid conflicts
- no way to comment an array (say an `argv` where you want to comment terse flags with a description of what/why)
- formatters will easily re-sort them away from immediate context

I do like that JSON is a dead simple parse (though semantics around its "Unicode" requirement are unfortunate[1] and "number" being BigInt and InfinitePrecision at the same time sucks). YAML has the second system syndrome and tries to fix too much at once and ends up tripping over itself. Nevermind that I'm not aware of any 100% accurate strict parsers for the format either.

[1] IETF's JSON RFC states UTF-8 though, so there is a good reference to lock that down at least.