this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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You're going to indent your code anyway, so why not let the indentation carry meaning?
Because I am not counting white space when I read. Or should we just write machine code/assembler/pick something straight away?
Not sure I'm following the jump from significant whitespace to machine code. How are those related?
Human and machine read differently. If you ignore that (in case with indentation), then why bother with writing human-friendly form of code, when what is going to be really executed is something else?
If anything, that sounds like an argument in favor of significant indentation, not against it. Humans and machines read differently, yes, which is why we tend to add whitespace and indentation to code even for programming languages where it's not significant. We do that expressly because it makes the code more human-friendly, so it's quite the opposite of ignoring their differences.
Because yaml is not a programming language, and debugging why your whatever you're configuring isn't working correctly can be a nightmare. It doesn't tell you you missed an indent on a block, it just assumes it should be there and changes the meaning.
Braces are visually clear.
I think YAML has its fair share of design flaws, but I don't think significant indentation is one of them. It may not be a programming language (which may be debatable), but there are plenty that use syntactic whitespace.