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Why are we templating YAML?

leebriggs.co.uk

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Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#131

Post by hyperpallium »

chriswarbo wrote: post #64
miohtama wrote: post #50

If you have been around long enough you still remember the world that was excited about XML and templating it using XSLT. As a hindsight it was a horrible world. Even though YAML is not optimal, it is a human friendly compromise between too verbose XML and machine only JSON. It lacks native templating, leading to funny constructs e.g. with Ansible files. However human kind has made progress and will make progress fur…

> If you have been around long enough you still remember the world that was excited about XML and templating it using XSLT. As a hindsight it was a horrible world. I actually really like the idea behind XSLT: machine-friendly, human-tolerable, structured data + declarative rules for turning that data into a display, or a report, or whatever else. The execution was horrible though: incredibly verbose, lots of overcomp…

The syntactic mistake of XSLT was writing it in XML, XPath was a redeeming feature. Imagine if XPath was also written in XML...

jq occupies the same role as XSLT, but for JSON. It can be used for templating but it's not quite as declarative as XSLT (you must pipe things through).

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#132

Post by hyperpallium »

pytester wrote: post #87
chriswarbo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have been around long enough you still remember the world that was excited about XML and templating it using XSLT. As a hindsight it was a horrible world. I actually really like the idea behind XSLT: machine-friendly, human-tolerable, structured data + declarative rules for turning that data into a display, or a report, or whatever else. The execution was horrible though: incredibly verbose, lots of overcomp…

XSLT was one in a litany of domain specific languages (ant, apache rewrite rules, latex macros, etc.) that evolved towards turing completeness because that's what the problem space demanded. In most if not all of these cases an existing and well designed turing complete programming language would likely have better served them.

Less power means less to go wrong. Automatic checks can also be deeper in a simpler system.

Your point is valid though, the power seems to end up being needed, sometimes, in some parts, in some cases. Escaping to a full language when needed seems to retain the benefits of both worlds.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#133

Post by jhanschoo »

alexk wrote: post #105
jrockway wrote: post #79

I saw this title and immediately knew the article would be about Helm. I don't think anyone wants to use Helm. People use it for a set-and-forget thing that they don't care about (who cares that it's called impressive-leopard-kubernetes-dashboard, after all.) kustomize is much more sane for your own stuff: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kustomize It is actually a little bit too magical for my taste, but I continu…

> I don't think anyone wants to use Helm. Here is why everyone should use Helm: Helm 2.0 introduced package as a first-class concept for Kubernetes and created the standard to distribute applications, thanks to Helm thousands of people could discover and collaborate on cloud-native deployments of the open source software https://github.com/helm/charts/tree/master/stable published and managed by organizations and cont…

I'm not very fond of helm's seemingly imperative approach, though. Am I mistaken about that?

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#135

Post by ravenstine »

BossingAround wrote: post #27

I know I'm in a minority, but I really dislike YAML... I recently did a lot of Ansible and boy, at the beginning, I was just struggling a lot. Syntactic whitespace kills me. I don't like it in Python either, but for some reason, when I write Python, it's a lot easier. Maybe YAML is just a bit more complex (and Python has better IDE support..?)

> Syntactic whitespace kills me.

Okay, I'm gonna be the asshole in the room, but how hard is it to just use consistent indentation? I can't count how many times I've heard people complain about significant whitespace in languages.

Not only is it not difficult to begin with, but every code editor and IDE will show you where there's a syntax error in your YAML. People are free to dislike YAML, even for its significant whitespace, but how does it "kill you"?

Look at this example from the article:

```

something: nothing

  hello: goodbye
```

This is pure sloppiness, and anyone who has trouble carelessly adding pointless bytes to code, no matter the language, is sloppy. I don't understand why people criticize YAML and Python because "whitespace is hard".

P.S.: There's a similar configuration language called ArchieML, which is similar to YAML but doesn't have significant whitespace.

http://archieml.org

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#136

Post by joeduffy »

saberience wrote: post #95
joeduffy wrote: post #57

My belief is that we've been slowly building up to using general purpose languages, one small step at a time, throughout the infrastructure as code, DevOps, and SRE journeys this past 10 years. INI files, XML, JSON, and YAML aren't sufficiently expressive -- lacking for loops, conditionals, variable references, and any sort of abstraction -- so, of course, we add templates to it. But as the author (IMHO rightfully) p…

Are you going to add C# support?

Definitely. I was a part of C# in the early days, so little else would make me happier than awesome class .NET support. This'll be great for Azure folks -- who knows, PowerShell too?

We are actively working on https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/issues/2430, which will make it easier for our small team to manage multiple languages. Once that lands, I would expect this to be high priority.

Some of our amazing community members have been prototyping this, and it's looking pretty promising: https://twitter.com/MikhailShilkov/status/109278757393889689....

Joe

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#137

Post by joeduffy »

kross wrote: post #128
joeduffy wrote: post #57

My belief is that we've been slowly building up to using general purpose languages, one small step at a time, throughout the infrastructure as code, DevOps, and SRE journeys this past 10 years. INI files, XML, JSON, and YAML aren't sufficiently expressive -- lacking for loops, conditionals, variable references, and any sort of abstraction -- so, of course, we add templates to it. But as the author (IMHO rightfully) p…

I have been using ksonnet but that is now officially dead. Working with jsonnet seemed unnecessarily painful when coming from coding typescript. This information is quite timely and welcome, I'll look further at the ts example.

We have ksonnet expats on the team (we're all in cloud city -- Seattle), and I've been keeping an eye on that project myself, since I think it got a lot of things right and frankly many of the ideas for Pulumi were inspired by early chats with the Heptio team. But, as you say, why create a new language when an existing one will do -- that was our original stance and it's working great in practice.

Joe Beda will be doing a deep dive on Pulumi on the TGIK videocast tomorrow, so it's a timely opportunity to check it out: https://twitter.com/jbeda/status/1092963296565587969

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#138

Post by erik_seaberg »

deathanatos wrote: post #45
MrStonedOne wrote: post #2

The real question is why are we using yaml at all?

Easier to read and write than JSON. JSON requires constant quoting, can't support multiline strings, has no comments, has no/little typing (e.g., no datetime type). It's not good if a human needs to encode data. For configs, I think TOML beats YAML hands down; I think YAML's spot is at encoding data structures that humans need to read/write. I do agree that YAML, the spec, is fairly complicated. But YAML, as used in…

YAML quoting is only optional if you're obsessive enough to always remember to quote the country code for Norway.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#139

Post by MrStonedOne »

titanix2 wrote: post #126
Macha wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's missing one important part for config files. It's tedious to write by hand.

XML is not tedious at all with the right tooling. For example a tool like Visual Studio IntelliSense proposes only elements and attributes valid in the context, automatically close tag, format the file and complete opening tags too so it makes editing XML file a breath.

The tooling bar for config files is set firmly at notepad.exe

If your config file requires more tooling than that you fucked up.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#140

Post by leg100 »

Aeolun wrote: post #112
zaphar wrote: post #110

Wholly agree with this which is why I've been experimenting with a project similar in goals to jsonnet as a side project of my own. I didn't know about jsonnet when I started or I'd probably have just used/contributed to that instead. Why template yaml when you could just generate it? Or generate json, or toml, or xml, or environment variables...

If you are generating it, why use it at all?

Because more often than not that is what the target system expects (k8s most notably).
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