[benley]

Honestly, I don't think JSON config files are a big problem. What's shitty is when humans are expected to manually create and edit plain JSON, but what's stopping us from using whatever tools we want to generate those JSON configs?

There are some very nice tools out there for this; I have taken to using jsonnet (http://jsonnet.org/), which is excellent as a configuration language. It's pretty comparable to Hashicorp's HCL, but it's a standalone thing.

Summary: Write your config files in a language of your choice. Render them to JSON for your apps to consume. Be thankful that every app doesn't have its own special snowflake config format like they used to.

[Sanddancer]

Unfortunately, it suffers from the huge problem of not having any comments, which was what the original poster was pointing out. Configuration is code that happens to be interpreted at runtime. Having to dig through uncommented code at two in the morning sucks, especially when you're trying to figure out why your automated code and/or config generator just failed. Yes, having to write a config file by hand sucks, however, there are still enough cases out there where you end up having to do just that, and JSON makes the problem of keeping them lucid all the more difficult.

[benley]

My suggestion, in general, is to use a static language like jsonnet to write config files. It's rather hard for them to break, because the language just isn't capable of talking to the network or various other things that config files shouldn't do. I do agree with you, and I would really prefer to have apps use formats that allow some sort of commenting, but I can live with json - by letting the computer deal with it.

[techdragon]

What I hate is that good tools for this like UCL go ignored or forgotten while JSON formats grow like weeds, and even excellent people like Hashicorp wind up contributing to this serious problem.

[seanp2k2]

Ooh, they still do, especially things by Elastic.

[benley]

oh god, LOGSTASH >_<