[BiteCode_dev]

After trying both Dhall and Cuelang, I really prefer the latter.

But this turns out to support OP's point. JSON is good enough, and there are many alternatives that we are debating and don't agree on.

So if you have to pick something, and I have to pick something, since we don't agree, we will fallback on JSON.

[sanderjd]

This may be right for a big distributed open source project or something, but most things I work on are proprietary within companies, and in that case it's easy to just pick something better and standardize on that. My current company is pretty much standardized on yaml, which isn't my favorite, but it's fine and better than json and we don't argue about it much. Things get serialized to json pretty often, but most stuff that is checked in and intended to be human readable is not json. A different company could easily pick cue or whatever else and it would work just as well.

[twic]

I think this is a neglected point. For application config, the scope over which standardisation pays off is smaller than for data. It can be company-sized. Or language-sized - if all Ruby library use YAML, that's great for Rubyists; if all Java apps use properties files, that's, believe it nor not, pretty great for Java programmers.

[kaba0]

Huh, yaml is just all around the worst on any metric. I would much rather stick to xml even.

[sanderjd]

Like I said, yaml isn't my favorite either, but this is silly hyperbole; xml is way harder for a human to read and write.

[lioeters]

Worse is better, yet again.

[Brian_K_White]

man, nailed that