JSON is one of the worst config formats, even worse than the Apache or nginx config formats. Not being able to simply comment out a config line temporarily for testing purposes or to leave a explanatory comment for special setting is simply bad.
Still, everyone forgets HOCON [1] is a thing, which solves many of the problems expressed here about JSON -for configuration-. It's easy to clearly specify things like time, reference other parts of the config, or if you want to change just one value, you can add that to the 'end' of the HOCON file and be GTG.
[1] - https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/master/HOCON.md
Skimming through it, concatenation of unquoted values is where it goes off the rails for me. This is quite the gotcha: https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/master/HOCON.md#not...
My wishlist for a friendlier JSON would be, in priority order:
- Allow trailing commas
- Comments
- Allow newlines instead of commas
- Allow unquoted dictionary keys
And I think that’s it. I’m not even sure the last one is worth the extra complexity.
I don't know why people would prefer that over YAML or others but at least you can actually add comments in them and the reason for their popularity doesn't seem to be baked in parser support because these tools are adding their additional "JSON" parsing anyway.