[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.