We have all been there. Your software keeps growing and you feel the need to make it customizable. It is too soon for a full-blown UI with all the bells and whistles, so your pragmatic instinct suggests a text-based configuration file. Yes, that’s exactly it!
You rejoice knowing the software’s configuration will be trivial to version control. Your pragmatic instinct is satisfied as well; the door remains open to creating a proper UI later, since it would be merely a graphical view of your configuration’s structured data. The future is bright!
Now, which language should you pick for your glorious configuration file? It needs to be user-friendly, so people can inspect it and modify it with ease. JSON springs immediately to your mind, but the abundance of brackets and the lack of comments give you pause. TOML maybe? You are afraid it might be too minimal for your needs. Rolling your own language? Too impractical.
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