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Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

leebriggs.co.uk

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Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#431

Post by lioeters »

neallindsay wrote: post #120

My personal philosophy is that string interpolation should not be used to generate machine-readable code, and template languages are just fancy string interpolation. We've all seen the consequences of SQL injection and cross-site scripting. That's the kind of thing that will keep happening as long as we keep putting arbitrary text into interpreters. Yes, this means I don't think we should use template files to make H…

> Haml, Pug, and JSX are not template languages even though they can output HTML.

That's nonsense, unless we go by your idiosyncratic definition of what a template language is ("fancy string interpolation").

> Haml (HTML Abstraction Markup Language) is a templating system that is designed to avoid writing inline code in a web document and make the HTML cleaner.

> Pug – robust, elegant, feature rich template engine for Node.js

> JSX is an XML-like syntax extension to ECMAScript without any defined semantics.

OK, I'd agree that JSX is not strictly a template language.

But in the end, all of these compile down to HTML. Not by string interpolation, but as a language that is parsed into a syntax tree, then rendered into HTML properly with an internal understanding of valid structure.

YAML with templating is fancy string interpolation, it's not a template language (or at least a poorly implemented one).

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#432

Post by unshavedyak »

zamalek wrote: post #378
armchairhacker wrote: post #38

To 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”,…

The problem goes deeper. I can't remember who coined the term, but all "implerative" (imperative declarative) languages share the same issue. I don't care if it's JSON, XML, TOML, or YAML, we shouldn't be interpreting markup/data languages. GitHub actions are a good example of everything wrong with implerative languages. Use a real programming language, you can always read in JSON/YAML/whatever as configuration. Goog…

Oh man, i have a similar issue with NixLang. Though i know it's not "implarative". Many days i just want to write Nix in my preferred language. I wish Nix had made a simple JSON based IO for configuration, because then i could see what the output of something is - and generate the input state from some other language.

Really frustrating. Nix works.. but i just don't see the value, personally. And this is after living on NixOS for ~3 years now, with 4 active Nix deploys in my house.. i just don't like the language.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#433

Post by [deleted] »

ithkuil wrote: post #419
ryandv wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, most operators I've seen are just k8s manifest templates implemented in Go. > I'm a fan of metacontroller [1], which is a tool that allows you to write operators without actually writing a lot of imperative code that interacts with the k8s API, but instead just provide a general JSON->JSON transformer, That seems... surprising, to me. It's not clear to me how a JSON->JSON transformer (which is es…

Metacontroller is actually quite easy to learn. It comes with good examples too. Including a re-implementation of the Stateful Set controller, all done with iterations of an otherwise pure computation. The trick is obviously that the state lives in the k8s api server, from which the inputs of the subsequent invocation of your pure function come.

[deleted]

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#434

Post by sixdimensional »

sixdimensional wrote: post #423
zamalek wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem goes deeper. I can't remember who coined the term, but all "implerative" (imperative declarative) languages share the same issue. I don't care if it's JSON, XML, TOML, or YAML, we shouldn't be interpreting markup/data languages. GitHub actions are a good example of everything wrong with implerative languages. Use a real programming language, you can always read in JSON/YAML/whatever as configuration. Goog…

"Implerative" - thank you for this, this is the term I've been searching for to describe the weird blending of the two things.. I immediately Googled it and saw that it has previous uses as well, I would love to know who originated the concept. I see so many times, confusion and arguing about what is imperative and declarative, to the point where I question the value of the terms any longer. FWIW, I have flirted with…

For the curious, this might be it: "I've cracked our marketing code, y'all! Pulumi: Implerative Appfrastructure" [1] @funcOfJoe, Joe Duffy: CEO of Pulumi

[1] https://twitter.com/funcOfJoe/status/1319667607214067712

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#435

Post by eropple »

Ygg2 wrote: post #262
Hikikomori wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer to keep my json to one line without white spaces, saves on disk space.

I prefer to write to my disk manually with a magnetized needle in a clean room.

Clean room's for tryhards. Dust adds flavor.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#436

Post by alkonaut »

Two things need to die and die quickly:

1) “blind configuration” Such as a CI pipeline config that you commit but can’t validate before you do.

2) Complex markup for config. Anything that can’t fit into a single screen of flat .toml or .ini style config should be code.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#437

Post by WorldMaker »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #415
WorldMaker wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with most things in vim, it is definitely manageable in settings such as tw=2 (tab width) and sts=2 (soft tab stop). This is why a lot of older Python files, in particular, are littered with vim modelines with settings like these. The nice modern twist is .editorconfig files and the plugins that support them including for vim. You can use those to set such standard language-specific config concerns in a general wa…

Of course you can override it, but is there any excuse for that default behavior? It sounds ridiculous.

The defaults are either 4-space or 8-space soft tab stops. 8 spaces it the oldest soft tab behavior. 4-space soft tabs have been common for C code among other languages for nearly as many decades. It is only relatively recently that Python and JS and several Lisp-family derivatives have made 2-space tab stops much more common of a style choice. Unfortunately there is no "perfect" default as these are as aesthetic preferences as anything else.

(It is one of the arguments for using hard tabs instead of soft ones in the eternal tabs versus spaces debates because editors can show hard tabs as different space equivalents as a user "style choice" without affecting the underlying text format.)

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#438

Post by wkat4242 »

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.

True, that's how real coders work!

10 IF A=1 OR Z=2 GOTO 30

20 GOTO 50

30 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

40 GOTO 10

50 GOTO 30

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#439

Post by sixdimensional »

sixdimensional wrote: post #423
zamalek wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem goes deeper. I can't remember who coined the term, but all "implerative" (imperative declarative) languages share the same issue. I don't care if it's JSON, XML, TOML, or YAML, we shouldn't be interpreting markup/data languages. GitHub actions are a good example of everything wrong with implerative languages. Use a real programming language, you can always read in JSON/YAML/whatever as configuration. Goog…

"Implerative" - thank you for this, this is the term I've been searching for to describe the weird blending of the two things.. I immediately Googled it and saw that it has previous uses as well, I would love to know who originated the concept. I see so many times, confusion and arguing about what is imperative and declarative, to the point where I question the value of the terms any longer. FWIW, I have flirted with…

Also an interesting post referencing the term in a previous comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31182790

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#440

Post by Dylan16807 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #437
Dylan16807 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you can override it, but is there any excuse for that default behavior? It sounds ridiculous.

The defaults are either 4-space or 8-space soft tab stops. 8 spaces it the oldest soft tab behavior. 4-space soft tabs have been common for C code among other languages for nearly as many decades. It is only relatively recently that Python and JS and several Lisp-family derivatives have made 2-space tab stops much more common of a style choice. Unfortunately there is no "perfect" default as these are as aesthetic pre…

Soft tabs at 4 would be fine, though worse than autodetect. But that is not the behavior described in the above post.
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