Hash maps. Everyone just turns their brains off and uses hash maps for everything. The code this creates is awful for users, awful for people consuming it, awful for people maintaining it.

Think for five minutes about your abstraction and create meaningful types and config languages, don't just hack it with a hashmap.

Do you mean just passing around values as key-value pairs in hashmaps instead of something meaningfully typed, or something else?

Can you elaborate on common misuses you see?

It sort of sounds like you want a ~yaml config that's unmarshaled to an object.

[dead]