I love EDN (especially the integrant extensions) for configuration of the stack — that is, dependency injection and so on, the developer-focused configuration.

For user-facing configuration I still favour TOML. I think it’s a bit application dependent, sone applications (eg nginx) have complex configuration needs and for that it makes sense to use something more sophisticated, but for many user-facing config settings, a simpler-TOML would be a great fit. Basically just some basic key-value pairs that can be collected into groups. As the article states, the parsing types should perhaps be enforced by the parser not the written config.

Why do you love edn? Specifically I also like edn, but I always felt like my use of it was glorified json.

I did like integrant, at least I felt like I understood it, unlike component.

There were two things about edn that made it seem better than json to me, tagged elements (and readers), and symbols. I don't remember exactly my use case but I used symbols in edn to something like namespace-resolution for multimethods. It was something like including a file in a classpath or loading a file, dev vs prod kind of config.

I suppose mostly superficial reasons such as liking the keyword syntax better that using string keys in json, but also the richer set of data types (like sets), although that mostly doesn’t matter in practice, but it is very nice when using Clojure since the Clojure types just work. As an interchange or storage format it’s also nice to be able to store Clojure types and get them back the way they were out in, which if using json you would lose some information.

Mainly it’s just personal taste and no deep reasons.