[itohihiyt]

I love me an INI. By far, IMO, the best human readable config syntax. Sure it's got some gotchas, like all old formats (CSV) there's no spec. But if I have the choice I'd go INI. It's simple and leaves the choices up to the program that's reading the file, because everything is a string.

To me there's no difference in this articles argument that with INI people would have to remember about the idiosyncrasies of the python implementation related to comments, and people having to know and learn the correct syntax of TOML. I'd say remembering when and where you can comment is easier too.

Either way it's personal preference. I do occasionally like to reread this though (because I'm boring): https://github.com/madmurphy/libconfini/wiki/An-INI-critique...

[codeflo]

You’d probably be surprised how often people have to create config files programmatically. With properly specified formats, you can serialize the configuration, which means nesting and string escapes are taken care of automatically. With half-baked custom formats, you have to resort to string replacement and praying.

Having said that, there’s an official RFC for CSV, and INI files are de-facto specified by Microsoft’s implementation.

[itohihiyt]

Yeah, half baked anything is going to screw you over. INI files are certainly programmatically serialisable, otherwise they wouldn't exist. It does move the datatypes to the program rather than being encoded in the config though, which adds to program overhead. Horses for courses though, with greater flexibility comes greater potential to f*uk it up.

[aeurielesn]

TOML is a monstrosity and I'm terrified Python is backing it up.

I'd love to see more HCL.