There are, of course, workarounds for adding comments to JSON. If you think of JSON as a data interchange format, then it doesn’t really make sense to have comments. Comments are necessary to annotate what different options are for and why a particular value was chosen and-perhaps most importantly-to temporarily comment out parts of the config while using a different configuration for testing and debugging. One feature that is absolutely vital for a configuration language is comments. It’s too bad that this ubiquitous format is so ill-suited for configuration. These are actually all pretty good reasons.

And that’s not to mention all the existing tooling for JSON, including syntax highlighting, auto-formatting, validation tools, etc. Then there is the fact that developers and users are probably already familiar with JSON and don’t need to learn a new configuration format to use the product. Many languages have JSON support in the standard library, and those that don’t almost certainly have an easy-to-use JSON package readily available.

The biggest reason is probably that it is easy to implement. There are several reasons why JSON is used for configuration files. Why is JSON popular as a config language? But as a configuration language, it falls short. It is a flexible format that is relatively easy for both machines and humans to read, and it’s a pretty good data interchange and storage format. However, JSON is actually a pretty terrible configuration language for a number of reasons. Perhaps the most obvious example is the package.json file used by npm and yarn, but there are many others, including CloudFormation (originally JSON only, but now supports YAML as well) and composer (PHP). Many projects use JSON for configuration files. Why JSON isn’t a Good Configuration Language

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