IMHO, YAML tries to be too clever. E.g. the fact that it happily guesses types and doesn't require strings to be quoted creates tons of traps.
languages:
- en
- de
- no
portmappings:
- 8080:80
- 2222:22
parsing the above, "no" is suddenly a boolean, and YAML 1.1 parsers will turn "2222:22" into the number 133342 (because there was a helpful rule that thinks the latter means "2222 minutes 22 seconds" and turns it into the number of seconds... https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v2... )
I really liked it initially, but after using it a bunch I'd prefer a more restricted subset of it. (also hit a bunch of parser bugs/incompatibilities, where the complexity of supported cases probably also plays a role)
To be clear, both of those issues are just with YAML 1.1. The core schema of YAML 1.2 dropped parsing "no" as true, or (as you mentioned) colon-separated numbers as sexagesimal integers. But yeah, unfortunately a number of libraries that only support 1.1 are still being used.
I really liked it initially, but after using it a bunch I'd prefer a more restricted subset of it. (also hit a bunch of parser bugs/incompatibilities, where the complexity of supported cases probably also plays a role)