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.
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.
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/).
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 nightly-export
:schedule "0 3 * * *"
:retry (backoff :max 5))
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.
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.
[flagged]
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).
> 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?
See also: HUML [1]