Since many are asking/complaining that the author didn't provide alternatives, I'd like to point out the obvious starting with what JSON is - "a lightweight dat

Since many are asking/complaining that the author didn't provide alternatives, I'd like to point out the obvious starting with what JSON is - "a lightweight data-interchange format". Who is interchanging information? In 99% of the cases, which is the target of the blog post, it's a human/developer and some software writing and reading a JSON file ON THE SAME MACHINE, IN THE SAME ENVIRONMENT. That is coding! You can do a far better job controlling a piece of software by actually writing code, telling it how to run. Reversely, if you need to configure two pieces of software via the same config file, you need something that both can read, so you might go with JSON, XML, YAML, your flavour of the day. But think for a second: does that happen more than 1% of the times? It doesn't! Software like eslint (js), babel (js), emacs, etc are using configuration written in their appropriate languages, not in a serialized format. This allows for huge benefits. If you had the chance to work with AWS for instance, you would have noticed how their Cloudformation templates are insane. They have pseudo functions, control statements IN JSON (and YAML FWIW)! On the other side of the globe, GCP teaches its customers to use python or jinja (a python template engine) to GENERATE YAML, though you can obviously use whatever language you want, which is then consumed by GCP.