Why Yet Another Config Syntax?

The short answer is “Because there’s nothing like Python’s syntax for expressing Python data.” Some syntaxes don’t attempt to map to Python data types, your program must manually handle type conversion. Other syntaxes are serializations of data expressed in other languages. These are more expressive, both in data type and data structure complexity, but because they are syntaxes designed to express data it remains for an interpolation mechanism to be tacked on. Python syntax is the ideal choice for Python data representation and manipulation.

Plus, Python exposes it’s own internals making it easy to write powerful Python-like parsers that are, at the same time, safe. Plasmic configuration files may look like Python but they cannot be abused to execute arbitrary code or, for that matter, any sort of code at all.