Sounds like you have missed the "programming in XML" phase that triggered Crockford to do JSON: huge configuration languages, usually with almost good schemas.

Sounds like you have missed the "programming in XML" phase that triggered Crockford to do JSON: huge configuration languages, usually with almost good schemas. And nothing in there could ever fail before runtime. It was driven by a deep fear of programming, a desperate hope that maybe you could build something so configurable that you would reach a state of done after which you would never ever have to send the source through a compiler again. In reality however, often the best way to understand a problem in those configuration monsters (or the only way...) was to recompile the non-xml part with some tailored ad-hoc diagnostics. But the idea that the configuration was supposed to change a lot while the code is immutable proved surprisingly robust against ongoing demonstrations of exactly the opposite happening.