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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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I wish we would all start switching over to JSON for configuration files. It's so much easier to parse, and you can't screw it up with too many spaces or not enough.
No thanks. Yaml isn't perfect but by God json is best used to return and parse data, not input it.
My biggest peeve with JSON when I'm forced to use it as a configuration format is that it doesn't have any syntactical support for comments.
So I can't even add any notes to the file.
Yea, this is a deal breaker imo. My code tends to be 10 to 1 comments to lines of code ratio. Configuration even more so.
jsonc/json5 exists for this use case, but few tools actually use it, yaml is far more popular
No support for comments? Hard pass
Yeah, this is my biggest annoyance with JSON. As a data structure it's very elegant, but it only really makes sense to people who know how to code, and without the ability to add comments you have to rely heavily on external documentation to make it readable to most users.
And like yeah, both the wonderful (and foss!)
.json5and Microsoft's semi-proprietary(?).jsoncexist, but most projects just use their language's default JSON parser that doesn't recognize them. What I would personally love to see is.json5support baked into the default JSON parsing libraries of Python, Go, etc. (Enabled by a flag, likely.) It's a superset of regular JSON and fully ES2019 compatible, so there shouldn't be any issues.Instead you can screw it up by having too many commas or not enough. Hardly that much of an improvement.
It's IMO also so much clearer regarding data types. You can't accidentally write a boolean when you want a string.
Why not just write your YAML files in JSON syntax?
JSON is a valid subset of YAML