One annoyance with JSON as a config-file format is that you apparently can't put comments in it. At least not out-of-band comments: http://stackoverflow.com/qu

One annoyance with JSON as a config-file format is that you apparently can't put comments in it. At least not out-of-band comments: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/244777/can-i-comment-a-json-file http://stackoverflow.com/questions/244777/can-i-comment-a-js... You can put in in-band comments, by defining a JSON format that has a bunch of '_comment' keys sprinkled through it, but that's annoying because you've got to design that in, and decide which elements deserve comments and which don't, and that's just a big hairy yak which sits there daring you to shave it, practically begging you to do a bunch of YAGNI up-front design of the comment protocol, and then even when you're done you still have to fret about how those keys might get misinterpreted by clients from now until the end of time. Even human readers will have to intuit the the semantics of your '_comment' key ("oh, the computer never reads this, this is just for me!"), whereas humans generally recognize the significance of real, standard comment syntaxes like # or ;; or // or what have you. Or you could use a JSON preprocessor that strips the comments, but that's a little trap that you build for yourself, because now your JSON is no longer universally-parseable by any language's JSON library. You could strip the comments at build time, but now your production JSON files on the server don't have the comments, and this is likely to be just where you need them - you put them there for the troubleshooter, who will find them at 3am when the server just crashed. But I've sometimes used JSON for these things anyway. Life is too short for perfectionism, and it is a nice clean format. Almost too clean.