By the way, no hard feelings.

The best thing that happened with my early projects was the local community I was able to help build here in Brazil.

I've seen many local contributors that helped with my early projects do things well beyond what their dreamt of at the time, and I'm sure I had a positive influence on the careers of many people. All with honest, simple hard work.

I am sure many people remember I did some things first, and without any investment or marketing attached to it. Just a kid, making things.

To me, that is worth a lot more than VC money.

Isn't that itself just a variation on the ini syntax, sort of made concrete by PHP, itself adapted from DOS? https://www.php.net/parse_ini_file

Yes. I think this also supports my case.

For me, it was obvious to use `parse_ini_file` because it greatly improved performance (I didn't had to parse it by hand) and familiarity (PHP users already know ini).

On the other hand, there is no reason for toml to have chosen ini. Almost no other language had efficient ini parsers at the time, or any culture related to ini files whatsoever. It sounds like a strange choice outside the PHP context.

Python’s built in ConfigParser has an ini like syntax and was widely used.

Fair point. It would have made sense from a python perspective also.