Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

pkl-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 598 posts

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#441

Post by physicles »

filleokus wrote: post #307
jaseemabid wrote: post #7

Pkl was one of the best internal tools at Apple, and it’s so good to see it finally getting open sourced. My team migrated several kloc k8s configuration to pkl with great success. Internally we used to write alert definitions in pkl and it would generate configuration for 2 different monitoring tools, a pretty static documentation site and link it all together nicely. Would gladly recommend this to anyone and I’m ex…

Was about to ask if you had k8s api models available internally, and that someone should create some tool to generate that from the spec. But turns out it already exists in the open! https://github.com/apple/pkl-k8s-examples

Coming from yaml+kustomize, all those curly braces are a tough sell. It looks like they roughly double the number of lines in the file.

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#442

Post by Fischgericht »

bioballer wrote: post #438
Fischgericht wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Apple is the gold standard in creating new proprietary programming languages for often just evil reasons - typically for vendor lock-in. They invented the Objective C and Swift, and made it pretty much impossible to use any standard language to target their platforms in a cross-platform way. I can access the Windows API with any language I want. I can access the Linux Kernel API with any language I want. I can…

There's no "walled garden" here. We want Pkl to be useful for many developers, for a variety of purposes. Hopefully that's clear enough with Java, Kotlin, and Go being amongst the various supported language bindings. We also already support Linux, and plan on supporting Windows. It's also open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, which grants you the right to distribute and modify it. Cheers

I appreciate you having good intentions. I don't mean to be disrespectful.

This however does not change my position that we have more than enough scripting languages focused on string operations, and don't need another language. And especially not a bloated one that itself depends on huge frameworks. If the same task can be solved using a 76KB standard Unix tool, creating a custom language with a huge bloated runtime simply can not be justified. It's bringing a sledgehammer for a task where a swiss pocket knife would be appropriate.

And my position also stands that it would make far more sense to finally agree on a config file standard format, with native parsers existing in every major programming language, so people stop re-inventing the wheel again and again and again, with the wheel becoming heavier and bulkier and less round every time.

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#443

Post by Silphendio »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #421
ivlad wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TOML also is a good example of "creating problems instead of solutions": They deliberately (!) broke compatibility to the INI format due to "I can't stand unquoted strings". Yeah, emotional feelings about CONFIG FILE FORMATS. INI is hard to parse because without quotes the parser would not know whether it’s a “True” as a string or True as Boolean value. Formal parser that can be included into a program as a library…

Schemas are often better than syntax typing. In other words the program decides what the type is, not the file.

If the schema allows union types, I don't want to deal with unquoted strings.

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#445

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

Fischgericht wrote: post #401

25 years ago pretty much every program had a GUI to do the configuration. With help texts. On Windows, programs then either saved stuff into an ini file or the windows registry, both you could also edit manually. Today we have a programming language coming as a 87 MB binary to create config files. And to run that programming language you need to manually crate a ... config file. So what we are missing now is a 500GB…

25 years ago, the only way to get two pieces of software to talk to each other was to get their authors to talk to each other.

I'm quite happy that remix culture has finally made it to software tooling. The extra layer of abstraction is a small price to pay for the power it brings.

(I don't know Pkl, but it seems like it scratches part of the same itch that you might use nix for).

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#446

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

Fischgericht wrote: post #418
ivlad wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25 years ago admin would be responsible for one server, that they would setup and then never touch until (and sometimes after) someone hacked it. Now people are responsible for thousands of containers, and GUI simply does not scale. And the configuration of those containers is domain-specific and/or varies enough so that you cannot write a single config file and copy it over. This is why configuration management syst…

Oh yes, people DO develop stuff that is not needed. Back in the 90ies pretty much every nerd sooner or later had to write his own programming language (myself included). The difference between then and today: We did throw it away afterwards. These days every week someone spews out a new "programming language", claiming that the re-invented wheel is so much more round than the others. If fully agree that you might nee…

I stopped using sed because it behaved differently on my coworker's machine than it did on mine.

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#448

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

rockwotj wrote: post #282
p10jkle wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, that's where all the power of the language comes from. It's like writing your config in Go or Python (which I think is also a great approach) except its designed from the ground up for this use case of config generation.

Ah just give me typescript, I do not need to learn a new thing for configuration languages and at the end of the day the output is compatible with JSON. Typescript has all the stuff I would want: types, first class json support, an ecosystem of libraries (if you want it, I would probably not for config generation). And the tooling is amazing. Does pkl have LSP, syntax highlighting in every editor, debugger or repl?

My impression of typescript is that if you do:

a = 1;

and elsewhere:

a = 2;

The ultimate value of 'a' will depend on the order in which those statements are executed, right?

A configuration language should surface that as an error and tell you where all of the conflicting references are.

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#449

Post by lolinder »

Fischgericht wrote: post #426
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misappropriating a trendy word to use as a descriptor for anything you don’t like. This is how someone speaks immediately before taking a look in the mirror and realising that they sound like their parents. You are not the be-all end-all and your drive-by analysis of a technology is going to be biased by its suitability for what you do day-to-day. No amount of experience justifies your attitude.

I am sorry if the wording of my opinion has offended you. My parents most likely would have complained that they'd need 58 floppy disks to run this programming language. :)

It's not that it's offensive, it's just not conducive to constructive dialog. "Enshittification" has rapidly come to mean nothing more than "changing in ways I don't like", just crasser.

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#450

Post by kccqzy »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #44
HexDecOctBin wrote: post #36

I'm sorry, can someone explain why one would want to translate from one data description language to another (Pkl -> JSON, or whatever)? Why not just write JSON (or whatever) to begin with?

Well, Dhall provides something between JSON and a Turing complete language that can make a lot of configuration much quicker to write, if you can hack the functional syntax. Pkl is probably a similar concept. http://dhall-lang.org/

I love Dhall. It's purposefully not Turing complete (which is somewhat difficult to achieve in a language design) and I love that fact.
Post reply on HN