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Why are we templating YAML?

leebriggs.co.uk

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Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#141

Post by the_duke »

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…

Since you seem to be in the know, what kind of timeline are we looking at for Helm 3?

I've been waiting for it for over a year now...

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#142

Post by h1d »

jonreem wrote: post #88
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…

Also see `webpack` as a successful example of code-as-configuration in the wild.

Not sure if it was successful when people call it a hell to maintain and newer simpler alternatives like Parcel is gaining popularity.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#143

Post by chokolad »

joeduffy wrote: post #136
saberience wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

Powershell would be great, it has nice support for building DSLs.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#144

Post by heavenlyblue »

hannasanarion wrote: post #108
krferriter wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is a huge selling point of YAML. JSON should have comments added to the spec. The other benefit to YAML is human readability, which is usually better in YAML compared to JSON. A specific glaring example of this is when there are long string-literal snippets inside the document, in YAML this is massively more readable than in JSON.

JSON shouldn't have comments added to the spec, because people shouldn't be trying to read or write JSON. It's an application interchange language, meant to be written and read by machines. YAML is a markup language, meant to be written and read by people. Ever notice how most YAML libraries don't even have a "dump" function?

>> Ever notice how most YAML libraries don't even have a "dump" function?

No. I guess unless you’re using something half-baked, I suppose. Machines need to be able to edit configs either way.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#145

Post by h1d »

ilovetux wrote: post #72
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..?)

I find YAML to be almost unusable. IMO it's just not intuitive. If I get to choose a format for my config files I would only use TOML, it's just better (again IMO).

Agreed. From readability perspective, I started out with INI, which I ditched partially due to having no standard on the format and skipped JSON when it can't add comments, skipped YAML for not looking too intuitive, considered JSON5 but skipped for being not popular enough and landed on TOML.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#146

Post by andrewflnr »

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..?)

I know you only said Python is better, not great, but you might want to check out OpsMop: https://medium.com/@michaeldehaan/opsmop-building-the-next-g... . By the creator of Ansible, in pure Python, including the config.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#147

Post by kjeetgill »

hazz99 wrote: post #124
SamWhited wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools keep using it even where it's the wrong tool for the job, so someone must like it, surely? I'm sure it will be just like XML where it's the trendy thing for a while in the early days, then everyone stops and hates it for a while. Except XML at least has a handful of applications where it's the right tool for the job (it has a nice streaming mode), YAML doesn't even have that.

YAML is great for simple human-editable configuration files. Its very easy to write, and can be picked up quite quickly. Opting for YAML over XML/JSON/whatever doesn't make me a tool. It made life much easier for myself & my colleagues.

I think they meant tools like docker or npm and stuff. Not calling people tools.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#148

Post by h1d »

illumin8 wrote: post #55
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..?)

I generally dislike languages like YAML or Python where whitespace matters, and can break your code, however, YAML is way more easily human readable than JSON, so I started to appreciate it for readability purposes. I guess YMMV, but after you've used both YAML and JSON for a while, you might appreciate YAML a little bit more.

Have you considered alternatives like TOML or JSON5?

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#149

Post by h1d »

bamboozled wrote: post #63
illumin8 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally dislike languages like YAML or Python where whitespace matters, and can break your code, however, YAML is way more easily human readable than JSON, so I started to appreciate it for readability purposes. I guess YMMV, but after you've used both YAML and JSON for a while, you might appreciate YAML a little bit more.

The killer feature for me over JSON is comment support, it's definitely useful to add todo comments etc.

When you think about it, JSON lacks so much (check JSON5 for what it's lacking), it's hard to believe even a comment is not allowed when pretty much anything else allows, which is a showstopper by itself.

Re: Why are we templating YAML?

#150

Post by heavenlyblue »

jtdev wrote: post #119
Cyph0n wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is up with the strange comma positioning? I assume that’s just a stylistic choice?

It allows each line to be completely independent of it’s neighbors; you can comment and/or add lines without needing to touch neighboring lines. Also, it makes it visually easy to spot missing commas. Give it a try sometime, it’s actually quite nice.

But they are not independent: first line doesn’t have one.
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