[combatentropy]

In all fairness, I led him that way. I called it "extracting configuration from code", which is reminiscent of #3 of the 12-Factor App (https://12factor.net/config).

You can extract config to various degrees. My example is perhaps the mildest: just group it together, near the beginning. You don't need complex frameworks. In fact this technique first caught my attention when I was reading other people's shell scripts.

The next step would be to move the config to its own file. This is very common in Linux. You have some tight binary, that is compiled and hard to change. But then you have config files, often with dozens of options. It's a nice way to do things.

The next step would be to move the config to a different level, no longer in a simple file. This is often either a relational database or environmental variables. Linux commands use environmental variables along with their config files.

For very large systems, this technique is the same in kind, just different in degree. You get fancy specialized systems, like Hashicorp Vault, to store your configuration, at least your secret ones, like passwords and stuff.