The Dhall Configuration Language

#1

Post by bjourne » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

The Dhall Configuration Language
dhall-lang.org

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#2

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:18 PM UTC

I love seeing useful languages that aren’t turing complete. Tooling gets much more interesting when you don’t have so many impossibility results around all the interesting stuff.

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#3

Post by cbb330 » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:22 PM UTC

I absolutely loved using this tool to generate many instances of Datadog resources in terraform json. Not only did it simplify a nasty mess of dynamic typed and schema-less bash/python/mako, it taught me a lot of functional programming paradigms along the way.

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#4

Post by elikoga » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:27 PM UTC

Tried to use it and it didn't fit my usecase: Recursive Types are a bit difficult

Looks great otherwise

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#5

Post by svnpenn » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:27 PM UTC

    { home       = "/home/bill"
    , privateKey = "/home/bill/.ssh/id_ed25519"
    , publicKey  = "/home/blil/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub"
    }

This is the most awkward abuse of formatting I've seen in a long time. Just allow/require a final trailing comma, and this nonsense goes away

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#6

Post by sshine » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:29 PM UTC

svnpenn wrote: post #5

{ home = "/home/bill" , privateKey = "/home/bill/.ssh/id_ed25519" , publicKey = "/home/blil/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub" } This is the most awkward abuse of formatting I've seen in a long time. Just allow/require a final trailing comma, and this nonsense goes away

This is a by-product of Dhall coming from the Haskell community where this formatting was preferred instead of final trailing commas. It has been internalised and was carried on. I say this as someone who looks at this code and thinks "This is totally fine." -- but I admit, I'm environmentally damaged.

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#7

Post by notnmeyer » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:32 PM UTC

this looks super useful, but its also horribly ugly.

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#8

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:33 PM UTC

svnpenn wrote: post #5

{ home = "/home/bill" , privateKey = "/home/bill/.ssh/id_ed25519" , publicKey = "/home/blil/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub" } This is the most awkward abuse of formatting I've seen in a long time. Just allow/require a final trailing comma, and this nonsense goes away

[deleted]

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#9

Post by abathur » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:34 PM UTC

Previous thread w/ many comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20355405

Another ~similar project not mentioned in that thread is https://ucg.marzhillstudios.com

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#10

Post by junon » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:35 PM UTC

> Can you spot the mistake?

Nope, so now I have no incentive to use your config format because it's established something is wrong and it's completely non-obvious.

Thanks for not wasting my time, I guess.