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Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

pkl-lang.org

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Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#401

Post by Fischgericht »

25 years ago pretty much every program had a GUI to do the configuration. With help texts. On Windows, programs then either saved stuff into an ini file or the windows registry, both you could also edit manually.

Today we have a programming language coming as a 87 MB binary to create config files. And to run that programming language you need to manually crate a ... config file.

So what we are missing now is a 500GB framework that can write the config file for the programming language that is writing a config file for the actual program I wish to use.

I am sorry, but very clearly a huge chunk of today's "developers" really are in the business of creating problems.

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#402

Post by bioballer »

Yeroc wrote: post #383
havaker wrote: post #140

Built-in fetching of http resources and reading files from the filesystem[1] combined with turing-completeness are features that I wasn't expecting from a configuration language. I wonder if the complexity this brings is justified. 1: https://pkl-lang.org/main/current/language-reference/index.h...

Those sound like features that will eventually lead to major security issues.

I/O can be sandboxed via flags.

For example, see these CLI flags: https://pkl-lang.org/main/current/pkl-cli/index.html#common-...

And when using the different language bindings, you can specify sandboxing options directly in that library.

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#404

Post by timsuchanek »

I like the syntactic sugar of directly validating types through modules. However, configuration at some point always converges towards Turing completness. I’m biased but imo nothing beats TypeScript and schema validation tooling like Effect.Schema or Zod. Yes it’s more code to write but you’re not locked in and can adopt the system as needed.

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#405

Post by afavour »

Fischgericht wrote: post #401

25 years ago pretty much every program had a GUI to do the configuration. With help texts. On Windows, programs then either saved stuff into an ini file or the windows registry, both you could also edit manually. Today we have a programming language coming as a 87 MB binary to create config files. And to run that programming language you need to manually crate a ... config file. So what we are missing now is a 500GB…

That strikes me as a very uncurious perspective. There’s absolutely nothing that could be improved about configuration files? An 87MB binary feels like a very arbitrary measure of worthiness.

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#406

Post by n42 »

Fischgericht wrote: post #401

25 years ago pretty much every program had a GUI to do the configuration. With help texts. On Windows, programs then either saved stuff into an ini file or the windows registry, both you could also edit manually. Today we have a programming language coming as a 87 MB binary to create config files. And to run that programming language you need to manually crate a ... config file. So what we are missing now is a 500GB…

Yes, the windows registry, the peak of our craft. No need to innovate, this one’s solved, wrap it up and move on

Try taking more time to consider the problems you don’t have that others do, instead of writing anything off that doesn’t make sense to you (and simultaneously gatekeeping an entire industry)

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#407

Post by taywrobel »

Wow, I was at Apple back in the 2018 timeframe when Peter was first building this. He was hoping to make it open sourced even back then, 6ish years ago. Great to see that it finally made it.

I really wish Apple would learn to play nicer with the OSS community. I have yet to see them deciding to open-source something backfire on them monetarily or reputationally, and I've seen the act of them abruptly close-sourcing things sour community opinion (i.e. FoundationDB).

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#408

Post by sigzero »

n42 wrote: post #406
Fischgericht wrote: post #401

25 years ago pretty much every program had a GUI to do the configuration. With help texts. On Windows, programs then either saved stuff into an ini file or the windows registry, both you could also edit manually. Today we have a programming language coming as a 87 MB binary to create config files. And to run that programming language you need to manually crate a ... config file. So what we are missing now is a 500GB…

Yes, the windows registry, the peak of our craft. No need to innovate, this one’s solved, wrap it up and move on Try taking more time to consider the problems you don’t have that others do, instead of writing anything off that doesn’t make sense to you (and simultaneously gatekeeping an entire industry)

I am taking your comment as a joke because the Windows Registry is a joke.

Re: Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration

#410

Post by Aeolun »

afavour wrote: post #405
Fischgericht wrote: post #401

25 years ago pretty much every program had a GUI to do the configuration. With help texts. On Windows, programs then either saved stuff into an ini file or the windows registry, both you could also edit manually. Today we have a programming language coming as a 87 MB binary to create config files. And to run that programming language you need to manually crate a ... config file. So what we are missing now is a 500GB…

That strikes me as a very uncurious perspective. There’s absolutely nothing that could be improved about configuration files? An 87MB binary feels like a very arbitrary measure of worthiness.

I mean, there is something to be said against using the equivalent of 87 novels worth of text to produce a note’s worth of configuration.
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