jr conlin's ink stained banana

This morning, i came across an article asking whether or not the Apache httpd.conf file should be rewritten in Lua, and it got me really thinking.

What the hell happened to people wanting to make things easier?

Seriously, pulling religious feelings toward Lua aside, imagine if the article had suggested converting the httpd.conf to Perl (or Javascript, COBOL, PL*SQL or what have you). Yes, there would be benefits (common sections of configuration could be stored in variables or functions, marshaling data would be "the compilers problem") but honestly, can you imagine how someone who's just learning LAMP for the first time would react to this?

Can you remember what setting up sendmail.cf was like?

Yes, Apache's current config file system is a mess of psuedo XML declarations. What's worse is that PHP's config is a mess of psuedo Win.ini declarations which have no real correlation to apache's config. Java uses long lists of variable declarations like 'foo.bar.gorp.banana.kenny.rogers="hit me with your rhythm stick"'. (hmm… pay no attention to the reoccurring pattern. It's obviously inferior.)

May Turning have mercy on your soul if you ever have to deal with sendmail.cf. (A file so delightfully arcane that is spawned a configuration compiler, which i'll note that the original author doesn't seem to be quite so eager to use for Apache.)

i know that geeks are the last people on earth to want to talk to people, but Holy Tower of Babel folks, if anything this is a problem that needs to be addressed. Can we please craft a set of pan-language, multi-application configuration reader libraries so we can have a common syntax for all this crap?

Pretty Please?

With Sprinkles?

Let's stop trying to make things even more isolated and complicated.