My beef with YAML is that configuration should be flat, not hierarchical. There should be at very most one layer of nesting, to facilitate categories. INI files

My beef with YAML is that configuration should be flat, not hierarchical. There should be at very most one layer of nesting, to facilitate categories. INI files are fine. People do unholy things with it like nest bash scripts in it that should never be done. Text files should never have more than one syntax needing parsing. It's bad enough, say, embedding SQL into some python. But doing that with YAML is just the worst. You should be able to use regexes to deal with non-code text files. JSON, YAML, the whole motley crew require parsing. Don't get me started on JSON log files.