My project uses .py files as config files right now. They are very hard to modify from scripts, we had to write our own simplified-python parser. The config files are complex, lots of dicts and we need to modify them a lot, sometimes with scripts.
I would like to move the project to configuration files that support comments (so pure JSON is out) and ideally a format that is supported by more than just Python with existing simple parsers. Ideally something that doesn't look too different from JSON/Python dicts. The project uses a lot of dicts/hashes to organize the configuration.
It is surprisingly hard to find a file format for this use case!
Candidates:
JSON5: would be perfect, but there only one library to parse/edit/write that preserves the comments and it's in Javascript which the backend people don't use: https://github.com/noahsug/json5-writer and it's in Javascript.
HJSON, looks perfect but cannot find a library the supports preserving comments / writing back.
YAML: only comment-preserving library is ruaml, and only Python. Would be OK, but looks quite different from JSON/Python and would be nice to have at least one other language supported.
XML sucks, INI doesn't have dicts/hashes, eno-lang looks weird, TOML has no comment-preserving parser and dicts there look weird with the dot notation.
A good overview of the topic is here but it's from 2016: https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/more-comment-preserving-configuration-parsers/