Ansible is a Lisp? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ansible is a Lisp?

#41

Post by vindarel » Mon, May 06, 2024, 11:54 AM UTC

Those are 2 lisp tools not unlike Ansible:

* [Consfigurator](https://spwhitton.name/tech/code/consfigurator/) - Lisp declarative configuration management system. You can use it to configure hosts as root, deploy services as unprivileged users, build and deploy containers, and produce disc images. [GPL3][2].

* [cl-unix-cybernetics](https://github.com/cl-unix-cybernetics/cl-unix-cybernetics) (previously Adams) - UNIX system administration in Common Lisp. Not unlike Ansible, Chef or Puppet. [ISC][22]. - You describe your systems (hosts) using resources having properties. The properties are then probed and synchronized using only /bin/sh on the remote host, and /usr/bin/ssh on the control host.

(awesome-cl)

Re: Ansible is a Lisp?

#42

Post by Woshiwuja » Mon, May 06, 2024, 1:29 PM UTC

James_K wrote: post #21

> YAML as executable code Why must we do these things to ourselves?

YAML is one of the best configs languages imo. Using it as executable code? MEH

Re: Ansible is a Lisp?

#43

Post by SomeoneFromCA » Mon, May 06, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

jeffrallen wrote: post #8

See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

Yet another catchphrase made by someone who lived through Lisp's heyday. There is not much "magic" in Common Lisp, aside from homoiconicity; it is dated old language, which reeks the smell of 1970s and 1980s in every corner of it. Yes it still fun to play with even today, but it is not some magic unicorn everything evolves into eventually.

Re: Ansible is a Lisp?

#44

Post by btilly » Tue, May 07, 2024, 12:31 AM UTC

ptx wrote: post #33

btilly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all of HTML can be represented with s-expressions. The following is perfectly valid. Hello World! Greetings Earthlings!

Is it actually valid? W3C's HTML validator complains about invalid nesting. It might work because the HTML5 parsing algorithm produces well-defined results for broken HTML, but I'm not sure that's the same as "perfectly valid" – the spec calls such markup "misnested" and "erroneous" [0]. [0] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#an-introduction-to-error-handl...

It certainly was valid according to the original specs. I first saw it as an example over 20 years ago in a debate about whether XHTML should replace HTML 4.0.

Re: Ansible is a Lisp?

#45

Post by jeffrallen » Wed, May 08, 2024, 12:17 PM UTC

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #43

jeffrallen wrote: post #8

See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

Yet another catchphrase made by someone who lived through Lisp's heyday. There is not much "magic" in Common Lisp, aside from homoiconicity; it is dated old language, which reeks the smell of 1970s and 1980s in every corner of it. Yes it still fun to play with even today, but it is not some magic unicorn everything evolves into eventually.

I agree that common lisp has "avocado tile in the kitchen" vibes.

But Clojure is all stainless steel and engineered stone.

So maybe if philg updated his aphorism to mention Clojure it would still fly.