Show HN: Kasaya – A scripting language and runtime for browser automation

Post by alwillis » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

threatofrain wrote: post #56

debaserab2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these kinds of HN comments share the same flaw: they unnecessarily detract from the work the OP has done by attacking use cases that the project never claimed to solve. DSL's, for all their problems, do simplify complex programming logic, and people use them every day to do great things. DSL's like Ansible and Chef save people an order of magnitude of time for server provisioning hence why they are wildly popular…

Using Ansible is what made me lose faith in DSL's in all the ways mentioned (eventually wanted loops, conditions, variables and namespaces...). Ansible is an API over a domain and if it were originally just represented through a Python language library I don't see why it would be less accessible or productive. Even something as simple as YAML can be screwed up and turned complicated.

Post by erikpukinskis » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

farisjarrah wrote: post #62

threatofrain wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Ansible is what made me lose faith in DSL's in all the ways mentioned (eventually wanted loops, conditions, variables and namespaces...). Ansible is an API over a domain and if it were originally just represented through a Python language library I don't see why it would be less accessible or productive. Even something as simple as YAML can be screwed up and turned complicated.

Building infrastructure is complicated. Have you found an easier way then Ansible to accomplish building infrastructure? Ansible does make yaml more complicated, however, you don't need to use much of that complexity for simple projects. Compared to Terraform, Chef, Google Deployment Manager, and Windows Desired State Configuration, Ansible is by far the simplest to get up and running on to do real work with.

Post by ofrzeta » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #63

farisjarrah wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building infrastructure is complicated. Have you found an easier way then Ansible to accomplish building infrastructure? Ansible does make yaml more complicated, however, you don't need to use much of that complexity for simple projects. Compared to Terraform, Chef, Google Deployment Manager, and Windows Desired State Configuration, Ansible is by far the simplest to get up and running on to do real work with.

AWS CDK would be an example of using a programming language rather than a DSL to build infra.

Post by egeozcan » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

kozhevnikov wrote: post #27

zabil wrote: post #14

This looks great. I also want to shamelessly plug something similar I am working on, Taiko, it uses javascript and comes with a REPL that generates scripts like. await openBrowser(); await goto("http://todomvc.com/examples/react/#/"); await write("automate with taiko"); await press("Enter"); await click(checkBox(near("automate with taiko"))); The reason we use a javascript is familiarity, IDE support and use of exist…

FYI to avoid all those awaits and make it chainable you can wrap it in a Proxy. https://github.com/kozhevnikov/proxymise

Post by masukomi » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

amitport wrote: post #38

swalsh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually kind of really like this DSL, I think it is going to be easier for my QA team to use this, than asking them to use javascript.

Seriously, how is this DSL better? With JavaScript you get method completion and debugging. Are parentheses really so terrible? You can setup a DSL in scala.js and you can get the best of both worlds (though, parentheses are fine for me so I would just use one of the many fine existing JS libraries).