It doesn’t help that YAML has footguns. I love it as an editable format, especially compared to JSON, but for library writers, supporting the whole spec (safely) tends to not be possible; Some even go as far as having a “safe load” function that purposefully violates the spec to remove footguns.

If you use "NO" it gets parsed as norway

The whole "`NO` is Norway" thing is indeed one of the footguns people love to bring up. However, as someone who is writing the YAML manually, and has a syntax highlighter, these issues don't manifest.

I dunno, this is where I said fuck it and never used it again.

I don't know what kind of mind will that as an OK reserved word for a programming language. but OK..

I guess I'm lucky I didn't need to use yaml for my work.

I thought it was the other way around? i.e. "NO", in a document that intends "NO" to mean "Norway", is parsed as "False".

I really like the Gura format (https://github.com/gura-conf/gura). Seems to combine the best of yaml, json, and toml for the use case of human created configuration files.

I've also seen the Dhall configuration language (https://dhall-lang.org/) mentioned.