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DSLs are a waste of time

leebriggs.co.uk

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Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#61

Post by ohgodplsno »

chubot wrote: post #51

FWIW this wiki page I started may help frame discussions like this: Survey of Config Languages - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Survey-of-Config-Langua... It puts a bunch of languages in 5 cateogires. Terraform is at least not a YAML DSL, a very common pattern which I don't understand the appeal of. I guess the main appeal is that you can copy and paste, and pretend it's data in simple cases. But even Terraform…

You can add other languages, such as Kotlin to that list. It is explicitly made to give you the ability to build a strongly typed DSL with proper scoping, references, validation, comes with all the benefits of a real language, including working language servers right out of the box that autocomplete everything properly. But that would require sysadmins to admit that editing all their config through nano with no syntax highlighting is an awful idea, no matter the amount of time they tell BUT WHAT IF I'M SSHING ON A SERVER IN ALASKA.

Despite all the complaints I have for Gradle (which, arguably, solves problems much more complex than "Ask AWS to burn through my cash"), its Kotlin DSL is impressively powerful and extensible.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#62

Post by manojlds »

ec109685 wrote: post #29

Hyperbolic blog posts are so annoying. Really, if OpenTF happens, you’ll be back to square one? “ When the maintainers of OpenTF inevitably decide that they want to add enhancements that require language changes, you as the end user end up in a situation where you’re effectively back to square 1, learning (potentially) a new DSL.”

The post is from 2021

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#63

Post by jauntywundrkind »

The AWS cdk is a pretty good example of how nice it is to have actual code doing the things. People know JS and know how to use it & it's imminently flexible.

By compare every dsl requires learning some new language. The languages seem to grow and grow. I know plenty of people with a little bit of Terraform experience, but almost no one with extensive knowledge. It's great that surfing along the top works as well as it does, and having such a confined language keeps a normativeness, but in general I so strongly feel it's just better to use available known well supported tools.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#64

Post by kagevf »

gumby wrote: post #21

Ultimately, what is an API but a domain-specific language? This article could well have been written about that. People often talk about Lisp as a language in which people specify DSLs, but that acronym was something I only encountered outside the Lisp community. The way it always felt to me was that I "simply" designed a set of datastructures and operations around the abstractions and metaphors of the problem domain…

It seems to be more of a spectrum in Lisps, spanning from syntax enhancements to full blown languages.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#65

Post by diego_moita »

eduction wrote: post #20

We stop calling the useful ones “DSLs” so this is a truism. Is SQL a “waste of time?” Regular expressions, HTML, Makefiles, CSS (and CSS selectors aka jquery selectors)? It’s the bad ones that are a waste of time. The ones still called “dsl” instead of just “language, “format,” or “syntax.”

> We stop calling the useful ones “DSLs” so this is a truism.

Bingo!

Lua was born as a DSL for configuration files. Today is way more than that.

JSON was born as a DSL for describing data, a less verbose alternative to XML. It is more than that.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#66

Post by zamalek »

Buildah, specifically after struggling with containerfiles/dockerfiles nonsense, entrenched beliefs that agree with the author of the article. Dockerfiles are just an obnoxiously limited DSL that make all the worst assumptions (especially concerning layering), while providing nearly no flexibility. Buildah (when not using buildah bud) lets you write a container build script in the scripting language of your choice - most likely bash - and puts you in charge of layering.

I mean, sure, you don't get that automagic in-between later reuse - but I've rarely come across a project that does the magic incantations to get that to work anyway. Rather delegate the rarely changing stuff to a base image, probably updating in CI.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#67

Post by owlstuffing »

schmichael wrote: post #45
eduction wrote: post #20

We stop calling the useful ones “DSLs” so this is a truism. Is SQL a “waste of time?” Regular expressions, HTML, Makefiles, CSS (and CSS selectors aka jquery selectors)? It’s the bad ones that are a waste of time. The ones still called “dsl” instead of just “language, “format,” or “syntax.”

JavaScript was a cute little DSL once too! I feel like the author missed a more obvious comparison between Puppetlang and HCL: vendor specific languages. When you consider them from that perspective it’s clear that the decision is based more on which company you trust to serve your long term needs over any point in time implementation details. Is that company Puppet? HashiCorp? Pulumi? The implementation details obvi…

Yikes! JavaScript is probably not the best example of a “good” DSL. It’s a crap language that benefited largely from being the only game in town re browser access.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#68

Post by baq »

jen20 wrote: post #6
OJFord wrote: post #4

I think calling terraform a DSL in comparison to general purpose programming languages misses the point. If it used a declarative GPPL instead of HCL I wouldn't care, but imperative alternatives general purpose or not are 'a waste of time' & not fit for the domain, IMO.

CDK for Prolog would be quite the trip. As it turns out, what matters is whether the model is declarative. As some uses of YAML go to show, declarative vs not is an orthogonal axis to how general purpose or otherwise a language is, and orthogonal again to whether it looks like a configuration file or code.

I hate yaml with a passion. It marginally better than xml for reading (wins huge on comment syntax) and worse for everything else. It makes zero sense we somehow ended up with it as standard configuration serialization format.

Note yaml is not a DSL. It's a tree serialization format! Everything interesting is happening after it is parsed. Extreme examples point to e.g. github actions conditions.

Anyway, back on topic - maybe not prolog for CDK, but still quite interesting: Dhall-kubernetes - https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#69

Post by schmichael »

owlstuffing wrote: post #67
schmichael wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript was a cute little DSL once too! I feel like the author missed a more obvious comparison between Puppetlang and HCL: vendor specific languages. When you consider them from that perspective it’s clear that the decision is based more on which company you trust to serve your long term needs over any point in time implementation details. Is that company Puppet? HashiCorp? Pulumi? The implementation details obvi…

Yikes! JavaScript is probably not the best example of a “good” DSL. It’s a crap language that benefited largely from being the only game in town re browser access.

I mean how you define “good” is an endless discussion by itself. For the purposes of this discussion I think considering JavaScript a successful and useful DSL are sufficient. I share your opinion that it is by no means “good” by more mechanistic measures. :)

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#70

Post by AtlasBarfed »

Any api is kind of a dsl in the sense you need to figure out how to converse with/invoke it, but at least you can descend into the code to figure out what is happening.

A lot of DSLs are a wall to understanding what each "figure of speech" actually does. You need to navigate a parser before you get to the underlying execution of the language

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