[conorgdaly]

"a few pages of XML that could easily be a few lines of json"

There is no sane way that you could represent "pages of XML" in "a few lines of JSON". Maybe the point you're trying to make is that you need just a handful of key:value pairs but whatever generates your config sees fit to do incredibly deep nesting...but that would be an issue with your application, not XML.

[dmichulke]

> There is no sane way that you could represent

I think you're wrong, namely because of arrays. Can you tell me how you'd represent [1, 2, 3, 4] in xml?

If you think this example is contrived, please compare the dependency sections of a clojure project.clj vs that of a Java pom.xml