[gsoc] DUB - Ideas

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 3/1/19 1:13 PM, Dennis wrote:
> On Friday, 1 March 2019 at 17:22:47 UTC, JN wrote:
>> It's obvious no one will win the SDL vs JSON debate. The only solution 
>> is to dump both and switch to YAML :)
> 
> Believe it or not, there is a proposal for a third format (the 'tree' 
> format).
> https://github.com/dlang/dub/wiki/DEP7

Not that I think there's even a slightest chance DUB will ever gain 
another format, but that page contains some questionable claims about 
SDL, and at least one claim that's just downright false:

It says:
----------------------------------
[Tree's] Comparison to SDL:
     Easy fast syntax
     Syntax highlighting in few editors (Idea, VSCode, Atom, SynWrite)
     More implementations (D,TS/JS)
----------------------------------

The third claim is flat out wrong. SDL has implementations for D, Java, 
Python and Ruby (that I know of). In fact. the D implementation is the 
youngest of those four. (Sometimes I get the impression that people 
think I created SDLang, and did so for D, despite my attempts to dispel 
that notion. I was looking for a sane alternative to XML/JSON/YAML, 
found SDL, and wanted to use it in D. Just like how I once looked for a 
sane alternative to C++ and Java2/4, and found D.)

The second claim is tenuous at best: Even without a dedicated "SDLang 
highlighter", I can go right through my editor's list of supported 
highlighters and most of them do an entirely useable job highlighting 
SDLang. It's not exactly a complicated language: It's basically just 
custom identifiers and a few literals and grouping symbols. Just like 
JSON/etc, there's just not much semantic or syntactic detail there TO 
highlight.

The first one is a highly subjective matter of opinion. SDL and Tree 
(based on what I can tell from the example provided) *both* have very 
simple easy syntaxes that put XML, JSON and YAML to shame. Comparing the 
two directly against each other, well, they're pretty much on par with 
each other in this regard, any advantage to be had is slight at best.

Someone else mentioned TOML, too. Just looked it up. That's also a very 
nice data language too, just like Tree and SDLang are. Hell, there's so 
much out there that just puts the XML/JSON/YAML popular kids clique to 
shame. I find it absolutely disgusting, shameful and frankly, 
professionally negligent, that a *technical* field such as ours 
routinely prioritizes and even promotes following the cool kids' table 
over actual, freaking technical merit.