You missed the "/s" bit, I presume? But you certainly have a point.
If JSON still fits somewhere - that's nice, it means the issue is just about YAML syntax (which is a matter of personal preference, really; but I thought we left all the entertainment of putting Pythonistas and Perl Hackers in a virtual ring in the past decade, somewhere next to /.'s grave).
If JSON feels worse - it means YAML's syntax is not a problem, it's a symptom of YAML being misplaced to express something other than a simple data structure.
No /s, either JSON is OK for you or it's not, and if not a slightly nicer looking but way more error prone JSON doesn't solve your problem.
1. If you're making a user-facing program you give them a nice settings menu and store the config as whatever.
2. if it's developer-targeted software, and your config starts approaching a scripting language you don't encode arbitrary computations in YAML (or XML, Microsoft), but rather let the user use a scripting language and preferably you don't invent a new one.
We always cry about fragmentation and complexity in software and yet even in the rare cases when we have universally agreed upon formats/standards we will still go out of our way to make a new one for the amazing benefit of significant whitespace.
If JSON still fits somewhere - that's nice, it means the issue is just about YAML syntax (which is a matter of personal preference, really; but I thought we left all the entertainment of putting Pythonistas and Perl Hackers in a virtual ring in the past decade, somewhere next to /.'s grave).
If JSON feels worse - it means YAML's syntax is not a problem, it's a symptom of YAML being misplaced to express something other than a simple data structure.