> It just doesn't compete with the ease-of-use of data / declarative configuration of VSCode's JSON approach What‽ S-expressions are head-and-shoulders better

> It just doesn't compete with the ease-of-use of data / declarative configuration of VSCode's JSON approach What‽ S-expressions are head-and-shoulders better at declarative configuration than JSON. Compare these two options (the JSON is from https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/admin-api/creating-config-files https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/admin-api/creating-c...): { "deployment": { "files": { "example-resource-file1": { "sourceUrl": "https://storage.googleapis.com/[MY_BUCKET_ID]/example-application/example-resource-file1" }, "images/example-resource-file2": { "sourceUrl": "https://storage.googleapis.com/[MY_BUCKET_ID]/example-application/images/example-resource-file2" }, } }, "id": "v1", "handlers": [ { "urlRegex": "/.*", "script": { "scriptPath": "example-python-app.py" } }, ], "runtime": "python27", "threadsafe": true, } vs. (app (deployment (files (example-resource-file-1 "https://storage.googleapis.com/[MY_BUCKET_ID]/example-application/example-resource-file1") (images/example-resource-file2 "https://storage.googleapis.com/[MY_BUCKET_ID]/example-application/images/example-resource-file2"))) (id v1) (handlers ("/.*" (script "example-python-app.py"))) (runtime python27) (threadsafe true)) And that's just a naïve translation — a more diligent reinterpretation would be even better. Still, even the relatively-thoughtless translation is demonstrably better, easier to grok and think about.