Gotta be honest, any time there's a solution like there that makes it more "human" they've just removed the structure / syntax.
I'm guessing so you don't need to learn them, so then anyone off the street can edit the files, but it will break so bad without those guardrails, usually in some non-obvious way.
Leading us back to inventing some new "human" thing, but with more implicit rules, and the cycle continues.
> 'the name': 'quotes are the escape hatch, when a key needs spaces'
To quote David Fincher:
> They know you have computers and can show a Tyrannosaurus Rex eat a car, so they know you can do anything. The question is: what don't you do, not what do you do.
Constraints liberate; I wish people tended to more strictness. I had plenty of stumbling over "features", asking myself who couldve ever needed them. This particular one also irked me about CUE.
From the comments here I can infer that it has a schema and in turn I can extrapolate that this is as much "for humans" as many other config formats that are deterministically parseable.
A GUI is a config format for humans as it can you show what all of the configuration options are along with text that tells you what they do.
1. The readme doesn't make it clear what its "float" type is. A double, a decimal, implementation defined. I'm generally not a fan of restricting numbers to what a double can represent, like toml does.
2. It doesn't have a good way to model key-value pair like types such as tagged unions, polymorphic types, or function invocations. Simply allowing a key-value pair as a value (right associative) where the key is a string matching the keys of an object would fix this. Alternatively a function call syntax would fix this, which would also enable tuples as a concept distinct from arrays.
The tagged-union / function-call point is where I keep ending up too. Once a config needs “one of these shapes” or “this thing with these arguments”, data formats grow conventions on top (type: keys, YAML !tags, $ref), and every consumer reimplements them.
I’ve been building Forma (https://forma-lang.com), a small typed Lisp aimed at that zone. Everything is (head args...), so a tagged value and a call are the same syntax, and you declare the vocabulary yourself:
job and backoff are forms you define with typed holes. The checker reports errors at the line you wrote, even after macro expansion. The output is plain JSON (or generated Effect TypeScript, but could target any language), so the app reading it doesn’t embed the language.
It would be great if you had a simple website that allowed you to enter SOML and see the JSON side-by-side (similar to typescript playground https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/).
Cue only really exists in go, and has a dependency chain to make maven weep.
I think cue is better thought of as a language you use to generate JSON (or yaml, or, let's be honest, k8s flavored yaml) configs rather than a config language you use in your app.
Gotta be honest, any time there's a solution like there that makes it more "human" they've just removed the structure / syntax.
I'm guessing so you don't need to learn them, so then anyone off the street can edit the files, but it will break so bad without those guardrails, usually in some non-obvious way.
Leading us back to inventing some new "human" thing, but with more implicit rules, and the cycle continues.
> no key needs quotes
> 'the name': 'quotes are the escape hatch, when a key needs spaces'
To quote David Fincher:
> They know you have computers and can show a Tyrannosaurus Rex eat a car, so they know you can do anything. The question is: what don't you do, not what do you do.
Constraints liberate; I wish people tended to more strictness. I had plenty of stumbling over "features", asking myself who couldve ever needed them. This particular one also irked me about CUE.
But that's just a nit.
Ironically the project seems LLM-generated.
I don't want to read Claude's interpretation of why your project matters. I want you to tell me directly.
> your project
there's a very good chance there's no human involvement at all in this
From the comments here I can infer that it has a schema and in turn I can extrapolate that this is as much "for humans" as many other config formats that are deterministically parseable.
A GUI is a config format for humans as it can you show what all of the configuration options are along with text that tells you what they do.
From the title, I thought this was a specification for configuring humans. I don't quite know what that means, and I'm disappointed still not to know.
Could probably compile it into CRISPR editing spec
There are numerous inaccuracies in the “Why not TOML” section of the README. Here are a few:
> CVE-2026-44244 injected a [core] section into .git/config for code execution.
Git config is not TOML. It’s an ini-based bespoke syntax
> SOML needs quotes for a literal dot.
So does TOML, the dot notation is for nested keys. You use quotes for a literal dot.
——
FWIW I like the decision to have a first class duration type.
What I'm missing:
1. The readme doesn't make it clear what its "float" type is. A double, a decimal, implementation defined. I'm generally not a fan of restricting numbers to what a double can represent, like toml does.
2. It doesn't have a good way to model key-value pair like types such as tagged unions, polymorphic types, or function invocations. Simply allowing a key-value pair as a value (right associative) where the key is a string matching the keys of an object would fix this. Alternatively a function call syntax would fix this, which would also enable tuples as a concept distinct from arrays.
The tagged-union / function-call point is where I keep ending up too. Once a config needs “one of these shapes” or “this thing with these arguments”, data formats grow conventions on top (type: keys, YAML !tags, $ref), and every consumer reimplements them.
I’ve been building Forma (https://forma-lang.com), a small typed Lisp aimed at that zone. Everything is (head args...), so a tagged value and a call are the same syntax, and you declare the vocabulary yourself:
job and backoff are forms you define with typed holes. The checker reports errors at the line you wrote, even after macro expansion. The output is plain JSON (or generated Effect TypeScript, but could target any language), so the app reading it doesn’t embed the language.Looks nice!
It would be great if you had a simple website that allowed you to enter SOML and see the JSON side-by-side (similar to typescript playground https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/).
Looks like Windows *.ini format except ":" instead of "="...
Not really. INI has a fixed structure (section>key>value) and its values are untyped.
We already have TOML and it's great. I can seamlessly upgrade from ini to toml.
[delayed]
There's a comparison [0] where some differences are explained.
[0]: https://github.com/soml-lang/soml/blob/main/comparison.md
So a stripped down variant of cue? Why not use cue directly?
Cue only really exists in go, and has a dependency chain to make maven weep.
I think cue is better thought of as a language you use to generate JSON (or yaml, or, let's be honest, k8s flavored yaml) configs rather than a config language you use in your app.
Can you add README sections for the schema and supported types?
Not my project but there's apparently plan for schema [0] (the link currently 404s).
[0]: https://github.com/soml-lang/soml/blob/main/schema.md
> Top-level arrays. A TOML file is always a table, so a list of records needs a wrapper key.
I'm curious for example configs that are top-level lists?
One example could be something that's a list of files/folders e.g. .gitignore
Or it could be a list of records:
{name: 'Alice', age: 42}
{name: 'Bob': age: 44}
See also: HUML [1]
1: https://huml.io/