I used Tcl in the 1989-1993 timeframe as my default application configuration language. I stopped doing this when I realized the maintenance problems I was expe

I used Tcl in the 1989-1993 timeframe as my default application configuration language. I stopped doing this when I realized the maintenance problems I was experiencing with my Tcl-based configurations were never going to go away. Then for a while I used Apache httpd.conf style markup for configurations. That worked better but I missed being able to do the macro-style programming you can easily do in a dynamic language. I tried XML for a while until I realized that it wasn't much better and didn't make things easier. Then I started doing more with Python and Ruby applications and found that in most cases I could easily just extend whatever configuration scheme the application used for my purposes. These days I'm using Lua in everything I write that doesn't already use Python or Ruby for the same kind of things I would have used Tcl. Lua is efficient, easy to read by others and plays very nice with the surrounding environment. So far Lua is working out pretty well but in fairness I spend a lot more time thinking about configuration issues up front than I did 20 years ago.