I'm curious... what do you propose instead of XML for configuration. You know that is standard and everybody knows it. Remember Java was/is very good at parsing

I'm curious... what do you propose instead of XML for configuration. You know that is standard and everybody knows it. Remember Java was/is very good at parsing XML. > In all, these sound more like "it's always been done that way" and Stockholm Syndrome than actual convincing arguments. And yeah it is Stockholm Syndrome because shit hasn't gotten that much better. Editing massive YAML or JSON files isn't really any easier IMO. You can't even put a comment in a JSON file and unless you are using Emacs I think even S-Expressions are not easier. > It's not about whether it's easy to parse or not, it's about being easy to write and read when we're talking about a configuration format. And XML in all its glory is hardly easy to parse, except if you mean by using a ready-made existing parser. Except XML is extremely standardized and well established and yeah there are parsers in almost every language. JSON has changed its standard a ton of times. It actually is really hard to parse correctly [1]. > (and most things, easier than XML to extract values from) XML has XPath and XQuery. Both very well defined and have backing standards. ie not a random github project just supporting one language which is the case for JSON path. IMO XML is one of the easiest formats to extract data from. Even CSV is scary to parse correctly. >Why would I care for "preserving comments and whitespace" in a configuration format? Except if I was doing something needlessly complex, like generating configuration on the fly on top of user edited configuration. Which, the doing needlessly complex stuff, is what the parent complained about. It isn't needlessly complex if there are requirements for such. Maven was designed to be declarative and the hope was it could be imported by IDEs which it successfully achieved. You know one of the reasons why Rails and various other easy to use frameworks came about is you don't need as much complexity if it is a hosted model. You don't need massive configuration if you are hosting and not delivering on premise software. So circa mid 2000 was the Rails crowd trashing the enterprise Java and probably deservedly sow. However things are shifting back towards needing complex requirements because people want their cloud stuff to have elasticity, reliability, failover, etc (aka zookeeper) and that shit requires complexity. People complain about the complexity of Java but I honestly think modern frontend web development is so awful today that I would take even old shitty j2ee over it almost any day (well maybe not that far but close to it). [1]: http://seriot.ch/parsing_json.php http://seriot.ch/parsing_json.php