The Zen of NestedText

NestedText aspires to be a simple dumb receptacle that holds peoples’ structured data and does so in a way that allows people to easily interact with that data.

The desire to be simple is an attempt to minimize the effort required to learn and use the language. Ideally, people can understand it by looking at a few examples. And ideally, they can use it without needing to remember any arcane rules or relying on any knowledge that programmers accumulate through years of experience. One source of simplicity is consistency. As such, NestedText uses a small number of rules that it applies with few exceptions.

The desire to be dumb means that NestedText tries not to transform the data in any meaningful way to avoid creating unpleasant surprises. It parses the structure of the data without doing anything that might change how the data is interpreted. Instead, it aims to make it easy for you to interpret the data yourself. After all, you understand what the data is supposed to mean, so you are in the best position to interpret it. There are also many powerful tools available to help with this exact task.