Having worked with a bit of YAML, RAML,(which is a superset of YAML) and JSON style configs/schemas... I'd take JSON over YAML if only because it seems to be more expressive.

Still, everyone forgets HOCON [1] is a thing, which solves many of the problems expressed here about JSON -for configuration-. It's easy to clearly specify things like time, reference other parts of the config, or if you want to change just one value, you can add that to the 'end' of the HOCON file and be GTG.

[1] - https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/master/HOCON.md

HOCON is meant to be a friendlier JSON, looks like? At first glance, it has some nice ideas but takes it way too far -- just the table of contents on that repo looks longer than a summary of JSON in its entirety.

Skimming through it, concatenation of unquoted values is where it goes off the rails for me. This is quite the gotcha: https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/master/HOCON.md#not...

My wishlist for a friendlier JSON would be, in priority order:

- Allow trailing commas

- Comments

- Allow newlines instead of commas

- Allow unquoted dictionary keys

And I think that’s it. I’m not even sure the last one is worth the extra complexity.

I’ll have to find something wrong with HOCON and add it to my list :)

https://twitter.com/styfle/status/1237182409239658500

Though most tools that use "JSON" as the config format actually use some superset of JSON, like JSON5, and do support comments. eslintrc, babelrc, vscode config... pretty much every JS tool configuration apart from package.json.

I don't know why people would prefer that over YAML or others but at least you can actually add comments in them and the reason for their popularity doesn't seem to be baked in parser support because these tools are adding their additional "JSON" parsing anyway.

I have a hard time remembering YAML syntax (am I constructing a list or a dict now? Oh well, better look it up) and I know for a fact that it's not just me. JSON is much simpler.

I even prefer JSON over TOML because JSON is simple. TOML has arbitrary rules like how `table = { foo = bar }` can't be multiline, and all that time you spend debugging your attempts at its nested table syntax, you could've just intuitively nested some dictionaries in JSON.