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I hate YAML with a passion - I understand the goals of the project but the whitespacing and awkward syntax is really just too frightfully painful on large configs.

JSON by itself is definitely lacking in human friendliness.

HJSON and JSON5 were both solutions I liked. TOML is good too, and HCL is ok - but they don't quite serve as that nice drop in replacement that HJSON offered.

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> JSON by itself is definitely lacking in human friendliness.

I can't agree with that assertion. As i see it, JSON is practically flawless wrt human friendliness. It's a self-documenting human-readable data interchange language that's even trivial to parse. A lot of people have plenty of ideas about what nice-to-have features they'd like to see but that's just YAML talk that only leads to YAML nowhere.

Not having comments is massively detrimental to most of our configuration use cases. Being forced to replace line-breaks with \n is also really painful for longer strings. HJSON was great at solving both of those.

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