Wouldn't it be a better idea to use an existing programming language instead of cooking up numerous half baked templating languages?
Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
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Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#32I think YAML is a good pick for non-developers / content creators. The front matter section in Markdown files is a good example. Or is there a better, human-friendly alternative?
You just pinpointed my biggest peeve with YAML. It looks like it's "human friendly" because there are no scary curly braces. But you still need to get the syntax exactly right, so that benefit is very small. And now you have to keep your finger on the screen while scrolling in order to figure out what a bullet belongs to.
Then what alternative do you recommend for content creators? Do you use the alternative in Markdown front matter?
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#33For me, environmental variables are super simple and remove all the complexity of these configuration files.
Except when you need anything more complex than a string or an array of strings, when they become entirely useless.
There is not a single even slightly complex piece of software that uses exclusively env vars for configuration. Even bash or vim have config files, this is not some new idea.
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#34I think YAML is a good pick for non-developers / content creators. The front matter section in Markdown files is a good example. Or is there a better, human-friendly alternative?
YAML is all but human-friendly. It has far too many special features and edge cases for most people. Something simple like Java properties files would solve something like markdown front matter perfectly fine.
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Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#35I wonder whether doing away with config altogether is a solution. Just build an application that calls AWS APIs directly when you want to deploy or update an environment.
Preferably written in assembler, to avoid the extra complexity of a compiler, right?
Configuration files have been a common feature of software since OSs exist, basically. They serve a clear and useful purpose, even though they create some problems of their own.
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#36I think YAML is a good pick for non-developers / content creators. The front matter section in Markdown files is a good example. Or is there a better, human-friendly alternative?
You just pinpointed my biggest peeve with YAML. It looks like it's "human friendly" because there are no scary curly braces. But you still need to get the syntax exactly right, so that benefit is very small. And now you have to keep your finger on the screen while scrolling in order to figure out what a bullet belongs to.
This is least of my worries - just use VScode with plugin which gives red lines on and formats yaml, use yamllint in your CI.
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#37I see a problem here. I'm not certain if the sort of person who would choose YAML as their configuration language sees a problem here. There is a direct conflict between human-centred data representations and computer-centred. Computers love things that look like a bit like a Lisp. Humans like things that look a bit like Python. If you're the sort of person who wants to use a computer to manipulate their Kubernetes c…
The ironic thing is that, IIRC, k8s manifests were supposed to be machine-generated from the k8s's inception, you weren't supposed to write them by hand... of course, people wrote them by hand anyway, until it became unbearable ― at which point they've started templating them because that's how the things always seem to progress: manually-written text is almost never replaced by machine-generated config-serialized-to-text, it's replaced by templated-but-originally-still-manually-written text.
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#38To me YAML seems like the CoffeeScript of JSON, and unlike CoffeeScript I don’t understand why people are still using it.
I guess XML and JSON are too verbose. But YAML is so far in the opposite direction, we get the same surprise conversions we’ve had in Excel (https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr...). Why is “on” a boolean literal (of course so are “true”, “false”, as well as “yes”, “no”, “y”, “n”, “off”, and all capitalized and uppercase variants)? And people are actually using this in production software?
Then when you add templating it’s no longer readable and concise anyways. So, why? In JSON, you can add templating super easily by turning it into regular JavaScript: use global variables, functions and the like. I don’t understand how anyone could prefer YAML with an ugly templating DSL over that.
And if you really care about conciseness, there’s TOML. Are there any advantages of YAML over TOML?
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#39We are switching to cuelang [1]. IMHO it is better designed than Jsonette. Since Kubeenetes already has state reconciliation, the only thing missing in this setup is deletion. But that can now be accomplished with the prune feature. [2]
[1] https://cuelang.org/docs/integrations/k8s/
[2] https://kubernetes.io/blog/2023/05/09/introducing-kubectl-ap...
Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
#40I think YAML is a good pick for non-developers / content creators. The front matter section in Markdown files is a good example. Or is there a better, human-friendly alternative?
I'd personally go with TOML over YAML for that