Maybe this is an artifact of a generational divide, or with less generalization, a function of familiarity with tooling? For their most basic requirement, a li

Maybe this is an artifact of a generational divide, or with less generalization, a function of familiarity with tooling? For their most basic requirement, a line-per-item format will suffice, and provides superior usability. You can edit it by hand, you can use all manner of widespread *nix-y userspace programs to manipulate the list or generate it dynamically, and it's dead simple to parse. But if you've spent less time in that space, a canned 'configuration management' format sounds reasonably attractive, because it has well-defined semantics and you can build out your schema as you add more features without having to rip the underlying layer out. Attractive as that may be, once you bring in a format whose syntax needs balanced markers, your editing usability goes down unless you use specialized tooling that can understand that format. This is one of many find YAML more palatable for this kind of task than JSON, why CSV will never die, and why INI is a surprisingly good configuration format. TOML [1] took the best of INI and YAML, and is worth looking at as an alternative to JSON and YAML, while for batch ingestion of data, few things will beat the versatility of CSV. The one-record-per-line format can be implemented as one-column minimal form of CSV, so that it can still be extended later, if the need arises. [1] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml https://github.com/toml-lang/toml