Configs for any mildly complex piece of software ends up looking like: 30% implicit defaults that are waiting to break when you upgrade something 25% boilerpl

Configs for any mildly complex piece of software ends up looking like: 30% implicit defaults that are waiting to break when you upgrade something 25% boilerplate 20% derivable from some other configuration but you just gotta set them all explicitly 10% cargo culted in through copy-pasting from the last project 5% can only ever be set to one particular value or nothing works 5% silently ignored due to typos - (some of these are causing subtle bugs and some are preventing them) 3% critical to actually doing the thing 2% used to have an effect but that was 3 versions ago Of these flags and values only 40% have meaningful and correct documentation and 66% are different in staging and production but we are 85% sure that's ok. Yes XML, YAML, and JSON have a ton of warts, but a good part of the problem is how we layer configurability into software systems in the first place. The serialization format can only be blamed so much.