Hacker News user amelius commented on a linkpost to an article about how configuration languages are all terrible:

I don’t agree. Configuration files tell a program what to do. You want expressive power there. Telling a program what to do merely through values only makes things more indirect. To give an example: you can get into the situation that some configuration values are only valid when configuration value X is Y, and otherwise other configuration values are valid. What better way to model this than through an if-statement in a programming language? This makes it immediately apparent which settings have effect.

I responded:

I am involuntarily howling internally in anguish, and if the feeling could speak, it would be screaming “parse, don’t validate”. If some config values are valid when X is true, and other config values are valid when X is false, then use a different schema for the two cases. This is what discriminated unions are for: for representing conditionals statically, inspectably, serialisably! If some config values are valid when X is 0.339, and some are valid when X is 0.340, and some are valid when X is 0.341, and so on, then… I don’t know how to help, and maybe I must just avert my eyes in shame as I implement the dynamic logic. (But in that case it seems a bit odd to say you’re “telling the program what to do” with this configuration; I’d say you’re bolting on a little extra program at the start.)