Live data from Hacker News

The Dhall Configuration Language

dhall-lang.org

191–192 of 192 posts

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#191
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are hating BCL because it's not loved by anyone. It's like the poor kid who were supporting the prodigy that is the Borg, but is actually supporting the Borg ecosystem on its back, where the prodigy kid just grab all of the acclaim. That's just typical of almost all human involved affairs. Some dudes hard support but get 20% of what they deserve. Whereas some few get 800%. As for BCL, it literally had no investme…

You could use nearly the same argument to sing the praises of PHP at Facebook. (Or Cobol at banks.) Doesn't make either language any better.

I don't know php at Facebook.

But I sure can tell you a few easy changes for BCL ecosystem can make a huge difference:

* Testing: despite the common knowledge of testing everything, BCL has not testing facility. No man power to support this easy (easy in relative scale) feature.

* Code search: BCL has inheritance like semantic, but no support in code search to navigate the code base. That's ridiculous. If anyone claim Google cpp code can be supported by lack of code searching navigation, then BCL is rightly to be called mysterious and lack sane language design.

* Packaging: BCL is always halg mixed and half separated with executable. That's just plainly stupidity.

* Lack of sane abstraction from Borg: Borg was designed without package concept. Borg's package was entirely an invention by BCL and borgcfg, as an idempotent shell command executed before starting Borg job. Go figure how much a shaky ground BCL is relying on. And how much blame Bcl has to suffer on behalf of Borg's lazy design.

Re: The Dhall Configuration Language

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CUE's author invented Borg configuration language or BCL since 2008. BCL code is the 3rd largest human written code in Google internal code base. In 2019 Aprial, there is 180M lines of BCL, while C++/Java sits at ~300M. BCL configuration's large scale use probably is beyond any other infra as code use cases known to human. And the learning and ideas over more than a decade, is manifested in CUE. Personally, this is e…

CUE talks about unification, is that similar to prolog meaning of that term ?

It certainly has that feel... that you can make statements (express constraints) about a given configuration item — in any order — and the final result falls out (having satisfied all constraints or "errors").
Post reply on HN