It's the same with another Soham, who was moonlighting for years. I would not be surprised if he starts a company soon, given the fame he has gained.
Marketing wins.
https://github.com/Respect/Config/blob/master/docs/README.md
Then, two years later, toml (by a GitHub founder) appeared. It is almost an exact clone of it.
https://github.com/toml-lang/toml
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You could say that is just a coincidence, and it's an obvious idea that anyone could have had.
But then again, also around that time, a sibling component for the configuration language was featured on "The Changelog" (then, a very popular website featuring interesting projects).
https://changelog.com/posts/validation-the-most-awesome-vali...
It stayed on trending PHP repositories for months.
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So, either toml was stolen or I independently invented it years prior.
Don't do easy to implement DSLs kids, there's no way of licensing them.
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.