The key to this is machine AND human readable formats. That is why the text format of protobufs is such a good approach: - structured formats - declared schema

The key to this is machine AND human readable formats. That is why the text format of protobufs is such a good approach: - structured formats - declared schema - the parser to read the file is also a validity checker (at least for data types) There are tools that do similar with JSON but none are as simple and unobtrusive as protobuf tool chain.