Read this, delete this post and try again.

Yes, XML is different than JSON and YAML, but it’s not particularly easier or harder to manually read/edit than JSON or YAML are (IMO the are all a pain, each in its own way).

If you want to look at it from the programmer’s side (which is not what OP was talking about)… marshalling/unmarshalling has been a solved issue for at least 20yrs now :) just have a library do it for you (do map json/yaml properties to you objects manually?).

You don’t need to worry about attributes/child elements: <person name="jack" /> and <person><name>jack</name></person> will work the same (ok, this may depend on what language/library you pick - the lib I used back in the day worked either way).

If anything, the issue with XML is all the unnecessarily complicated stuff they added to its “core” (eg. CDATA, namespaces, non-standalone documents, …) and all the unnecessarily complicated technologies/standards they developed around XML (from Xinclude to SOAP and many others)… but just ignore that BS (like the rest of the world does) and you’ll mostly be fine :)

Yaml is fundamentally the same as the json and xml it has mostly replaced (and the toml that didn’t manage to replace yaml)… it’s a data serialization format and just doesn’t have any facility for making abstractions, which are the main tool we human use to deal with complexity.

Java have had very bad press lately (since the log4j fiasco I guess? maybe since before).

IDK why people blame Java for any issues with any library/project written in it… it’s as dumb as blaming C/C++ for all the windows fuckups, and nobody blames php for the various cpanel vulnerabilities or python for all the shit people write in it.

Best of luck to you!

I’m trying to understand Git, but it’s a giant conceptual leap.

Git is not that different from svn (I mean, the biggest hurdle is going from a shared folder to any version control system)… I’d say the main difference is that branches live in a different namespace than files (ie. you don’t have trunk/src/whatever but just src/whatever in the main branch). On top of that there’s that commit and push are two different things (and the same with fetch and checkout) and that merges are way easier than in svn (where you had to merge stuff manually).

If you create a repo locally and clone it twice in two different directories, you can easily simulate what would happen when you and a coworker collaborate via a centralized repo (say, github) - do a few experiments and you’ll see it’s not as complicated as it seems (I’d recommend using the CLI instead of some GUI client: it’s way easier to figure things out without the overhead of learning to differentiate between git concepts and how the GUI tries to help).