I wouldn’t be so sure.

Seems like every configuration file format starts off simple. Look at YAML - the basics started off pretty sensibly.

And then people decided they wanted to get fancier with anchors and aliases. Even GitLab has its own form of conditionals and variables, which is all a bit of a hack (only works in certain places).

Even Apache fell into this with its XML based config format.

So we end up with numerous “bespoke” programming languages for configuration management. Of course enterprise people don’t edit these directly - they script Ansible workflows to remotely perform the surgery.

Sadly, could have skipped all that and just have embedded a Lua/Python/etc. interpreter into servers to do the configuration management. Would be simpler than trying to programmatically edit bespoke config files.

Sure, one will say all the bespoke attempts are optimized for a specific use the way a general language isn’t. Except that only fits a narrow class of toy examples which wouldn’t have needed their machinery in the first place!

Remember Windows INI files? Back in the good ol’ days when code was code and data was data….