it comes down to what exactly is the configuration for. Is it a few settings (server urls, ports, table names, s3 buckets, directory paths, usernames and passwo

it comes down to what exactly is the configuration for. Is it a few settings (server urls, ports, table names, s3 buckets, directory paths, usernames and passwords), or are you actually scripting the tool? Build systems almost straddle the two worlds - they're kind of somewhere between config and scripting. At some point you gotta make the call: if the configuration file is hard to write, check first if it's a problem with the tool the configuration is for. then second, check if what you're actually doing is programming, not configuring. This is repeating what others have wrote, but I solidly agree- at some threshold of complexity you've got to stop calling it "configuration", and start calling it a greenspun's 10th: http://wiki.c2.com/?GreenspunsTenthRuleOfProgramming http://wiki.c2.com/?GreenspunsTenthRuleOfProgramming