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Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

leebriggs.co.uk

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Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#311

Post by lolinder »

fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #240
torginus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno, to me YAML is the python of markup languages. YAML is decent at handling things like nesting and arrays, while TOML sucks at it. I don't dislike YAML that much. That being said, we knew since the dawn of C macros that templating languages which are not aware of syntax, are AWFUL. Likewise, writing Helm charts (the place I encountered YAML templating) is just horrible, but would be so much nicer is templates re…

And then the second layer of hell, a DSL inside the YAML for something like an Azure DevOps pipeline. Truly awful.

My personal favorite was when my company switched to configuring Jenkins in YAML, with some of the config being in YAML proper and other config being in Groovy embedded inside of multiline strings. Since it's Jenkins, the Groovy itself embeds multiline strings for scripts that need to run, so the languages end up nested three levels deep!

The only thing that saves me is IntelliJ's inject-language-in-string feature.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#312

Post by jampekka »

Two9A wrote: post #263
jampekka wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I code practically exclusively with vim. The replacement is buggy and has many corner cases that come up constantly. As in all editors. Tab indentation has no bugs or corner cases.

And I've been using vim exclusively for north of fifteen years with Tab replacement, never had a problem with the editor getting confused about what happens with spaces when I hit Tab. Some detail about the corner cases you've run into would be great, if they're happening constantly I can see how it would be a bugbear.

For example with vim (debian) defaults, if you happen to have a 2-space indented Python (the first two spaces are for HN formatting, the first if should start at zero indent):

  if True:
    # Two space indent
And continue to add another if block in that, the autoindent will give you four spaces:

  if True:
    # Two space indent
    if True:
        # Four space autoindent
And if you make a new line after the last row there and hit a backspace, it'll erase one space instead of four, giving an indentation of 3 (+2) spaces. And if you start a new line after that, you'll get an indentation of 8 spaces in total. Ending up with:

  if True:
    # Two space indent
    if True:
        # Four space autoindent
      # Hitting backspace gives this
          # Hitting a tab gives this
This is just a one case, but things like this tend to happen quite often when editing code. Even if it's been originally PEP-8 indented. Usually it's not what the Tab does, but what the Backspace or Autoindent does. I'm not exactly sure what exact Tab/Backspace/Autoindent rules underlie the behavior, but I can imagine there having to be quite a bit of hackery to support soft-tabs.

For me this kind of Tab/Autoindent/Backspace confusion is frequent enough that I'd be very surprised if others don't find themselves having to manually fix the number of spaces every now and then. And when watching over the shoulder I see others too occasionally having to micromanage space-indents (or accidentally ending up with three space indented blocks etc), also with other editors than vim.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#314

Post by swader999 »

fatnoah wrote: post #295
andybak wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabs aren't a problem Spaces aren't a problem. What is a problem is not picking one or the other. There's arguments for both sides but it is critical to just take a side. I'm sorry your side lost but it makes everything better to just go along with the consensus.

At one of my internships in the 90's, a developer I worked with solved the problem by never indenting. Every single line of code started at column 1.

Why even use more than one line?

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#315

Post by throwaway_08932 »

fatnoah wrote: post #295
andybak wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabs aren't a problem Spaces aren't a problem. What is a problem is not picking one or the other. There's arguments for both sides but it is critical to just take a side. I'm sorry your side lost but it makes everything better to just go along with the consensus.

At one of my internships in the 90's, a developer I worked with solved the problem by never indenting. Every single line of code started at column 1.

Sounds like you were an indent-ured labourer.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#316

Post by i_play_stax »

xwowsersx wrote: post #245
Draiken wrote: post #72

I agree that YAML templating is kind of insane, but I will never understand why we don't stop using fake languages and simply use a real language. If you need complex logic, use a programming language and generate the YAML/JSON/whatever with it. There you go. Fixed it for you. Ruby, Python, or any other language really (I only favor scripting ones because they're generally easier to run), will give you all of that wi…

Pulumi is enticing because it allows you to write in your preferred language and abandon HCL, but it is strictly worse in my opinion. IaC should be declarative in my opinion. That allows for greater predictability, reproducibility and maintainability. In general, I think wanting to use Python or Ruby or whatever language you're going to use with Pulumi is not a good basis for choosing the tool. There are many graveya…

The limitations of HCL are actually a good thing!

I have never seen Pulumi or CDKTF stuff work well. At some point are you simply writing a script and abandoning the advantages of a declarative approach

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#318

Post by karlicoss »

Draiken wrote: post #72

I agree that YAML templating is kind of insane, but I will never understand why we don't stop using fake languages and simply use a real language. If you need complex logic, use a programming language and generate the YAML/JSON/whatever with it. There you go. Fixed it for you. Ruby, Python, or any other language really (I only favor scripting ones because they're generally easier to run), will give you all of that wi…

I argued that point in my article some time ago https://beepb00p.xyz/configs-suck.html also HN discussion at the time news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22787332

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#319

Post by [deleted] »

jampekka wrote: post #241
lkirkwood wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like vim, for example? Which supports replacing tab inputs with spaces...

I code practically exclusively with vim. The replacement is buggy and has many corner cases that come up constantly. As in all editors. Tab indentation has no bugs or corner cases.

[deleted]

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#320

Post by duped »

Draiken wrote: post #72

I agree that YAML templating is kind of insane, but I will never understand why we don't stop using fake languages and simply use a real language. If you need complex logic, use a programming language and generate the YAML/JSON/whatever with it. There you go. Fixed it for you. Ruby, Python, or any other language really (I only favor scripting ones because they're generally easier to run), will give you all of that wi…

I think language embedding is kind of a lost architecture in modern stacks. It used to be if you had a sufficiently complex application you'd code the guts in C/C++/Java/Whatever and then if you needed to script it, you'd embed something like a LISP/Lua/whatever on top.

But today, you have plenty of off-the-shelf JSON/TOML/YAML parsers you can just import into your app and a function called readConfig in place of where an embedded interpreter might be more appropriate.

It's just easier for developers to add complexity to a config format rather than provide a full language embedding and provide bindings into the application. So people have forgotten how to do it (or even that they can do it - I don't think it occurs to people anymore)

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