So what's the HN consensus on the best format for config files?
Is it TOML as the author seems to prefer at the end?
In the scale world, HOCON is very nice. It’s a format designed explicitly for config files, and has a lot of niceties (like you can append files together and they merge correctly, so you don’t have to end up with giant config files)
I agree with HOCON being nice based on personal usage but I haven't seen an in depth analysis of it. This is the canonical parser for JVM based languages — https://github.com/lightbend/config, are there many other implementations that are widely used?