Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

leebriggs.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 667 posts

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#621

Post by anon291 »

lamontcg wrote: post #523
anon291 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... Nix satisfies every single one of what you mentioned and people say its too complicated. It's literally just the JSON data structure with lambdas, which really is basic knowledge for any computer scientist, and yet people complain about it. It's fairly straightforward to 'embed' and as a bonus it generates json anyway (you can use the Nix command line to generate JSON). Me personally, I use it as my templat…

Tried to use Nix as a homebrew replacement and failed to get it installed correctly with it blowing up with crazy error messages that I couldn't google. I didn't even get to the point of assessing the language. It really seems like the right kind of idea, but it doesn't seem particularly stable or easy enough to get to that initial payoff. If there's a nice language under there it is crippled by the fact that the ave…

You can use nix without using nixpkgs (you seemed to be trying to use nixpkgs). The nix language is accessible via several command line tools, nix repl, nix eval, nix-instantiate, etc, and can emit json via everal flags, as well as a builtin function.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#622

Post by dewbrite »

berkes wrote: post #237
sigwinch28 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any practical difference w.r.t. cybersecurity between "I blindly applied this pile of YAML to my production kubernetes clusters without looking at it" and "I blindly downloaded and ran this computer program on my CI runner without looking at it". A supply chain attack on the former means that your environment is compromised. So does the latter.

I do see a difference. GitHub actions isn't going to run your Python code on its orchestration infra. Nor is DigitalOcean or Fly.io or CircleCI. They all convened around "YAML" because it's a very limited set of instructions. I'm quite sure you cannot write a bitcoin miner (or something that opens a backdoor) in Liquid inside YAML in the DSL that Github Actions has. I am 100% sure you can write a bitcoin miner in Pyt…

What? GitHub Actions, at the very least, isn't strictly yaml. I run arbitrary code in whatever language I want all the time. I'm pretty sure third party workflows can, too.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#623

Post by kadoban »

wkat4242 wrote: post #593
kadoban wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true in a correctly configured editor.

How so?

My editor, I press tab once and it inserts the correct number of spaces (on a new line it also starts at the previous indentation level as appropriate). I press backspace once and it deletes the correct number of spaces.

Any editor used for programming needs to be capable of this.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#624

Post by mejutoco »

wkat4242 wrote: post #452
mejutoco wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every editor I know can enter n spaces when pressing tab. That might solve your concern.

It does not. You still have to mess around with a bunch of spaces when you're editing or copy/pasting, and not having exact even numbers makes for ambiguous situations.

I use tab and shift tab on intellij and vim on insert mode. Outside of insert mode I use ">". I am on vim mode on intellij too. What editor are you using?

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#625

Post by unshavedyak »

zamalek wrote: post #538
unshavedyak wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be able to link the repo? I'm curious on your impl

https://github.com/nickelpack/nck I wanted to use Nickel, but it turns out that it can't do everything you'd need it to do to completely replace NixLang. So right now I'm bikeshedding on what to use instead (and desperately trying not to invent something), in other words it's definitely being renamed. Either way there's a bash script in the `test` dir that shows the general concept.

Hah, i had the same desires a while back. Didn't end up trying anything, though. Still hoping Nickel manages to integrate fully, it looks nice

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#626

Post by w0m »

bilalq wrote: post #404

I'm completely done with configs written in YAML. Easily the worst part of Github Actions, even worse than the reliability. When I see some cool tool require a YAML file for config, I immediately get hit with a wave of apprehension. These same feelings extend to other proprietary config languages like HCL for Terraform, ASL for AWS Step Functions, etc. It's fine that you want a declarative API, but let me generate my…

living in a yaml-world; i honestly hate it.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#627

Post by throwaway894345 »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #581
throwaway894345 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there are exactly two substantive problems with JSON for (static) configuration file use cases, which are comments and multiline strings (especially with sane handling of indentation). YAML fixes these, but it adds so much complexity in the process including such a predictable footgun of unquoted strings (the no/false problem is particularly glaring/absurd, but it's also easy to forget to quote…

Solutions abound, but one option is to use either Javascript (config.js): // comments! ({ no_quotes: [1, 2, (() => /* code! */)()], ... }) Or, let the whole thing be a function. Then your config can have parameters, maybe mapped from environment variables or something. ({foo, bar, ...kwargs}) => ({ datacenter: foo === 'old' ? 'useast1' : 'uswest', ... }) Can do as Crockford says, and write in the JSON subset of Javas…

Yeah, I'm mostly just not sure I want to put a full programming language interpreter in my application, especially Python which is not designed to be embeddable. Moreover, I would really want something that is typed, like TypeScript, but libraries for embedded TypeScript interpreters are even more rare :/.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#628

Post by lioeters »

neallindsay wrote: post #466
lioeters wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

I am aware that Haml and Pug call themselves template languages, but they are not. In a template language, the source is a "template" that has some special syntax to fill in some bits. I don't think that's a very idiosyncratic definition. Pretty much any programming language can output a bunch of text, but most of them are not template languages. Java has XMLBuilder, but that doesn't make it a template language for o…

Sorry, reading over my comment, I sounded more antagonistic than I meant to be. After all, we're here to enjoy discussion and not to battle against each other.

As an aside, on another post yesterday, I had a pleasant surprise about "templating" in life itself.

> The familiar distinction between software and hardware loses its meaning in living cells. We propose new ways to study the phylogeny of metabolisms, new astronomical ways to search for life on exoplanets, new experiments to seek the emergence of the most rudimentary life, and the hint of a coherent testable pathway to prokaryotes with template replication and coding.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09514

Maybe DNA is the original templating language. (Hopefully with more sophistication than fancy string interpolation.)

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#629

Post by Dylan16807 »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #617
Dylan16807 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started off with "I'm not sure what you mean" and you have given zero examples. I'm not being disingenuous. Other people can't read your mind. Other people aren't experts on the same things you are. And specifically, I described the class keyword as slight. Don't be an asshole by accusing people of things they're not doing.

do not speak with authority if you do not know. do not try and downplay something just because you want it to be true.

"I'm not sure what you mean." isn't speaking with authority.

And I stand by saying there was no need for the awkwardness with classes.

What did I downplay? You still haven't said what they did. I can't be downplaying a thing that isn't part of the conversation.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#630

Post by unshavedyak »

oever wrote: post #545
unshavedyak wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I see Nix as a powerful way to write config files. It is purely functional, so the only thing it does is create a build recipe. That build recipe is then run by other Nix tooling. A .nix file is either a config file itself or a function that returns a config file or a function. By passing in enough parameters, you get the configuration. I've not seen as clean a way of doing this anywhere else. Guix uses Guile which i…

The problem is (to me) it's entirely obtuse. I can't call the function and get back some configuration - which is insane to me. You have to pass in all sorts of state, and you have a lot of difficulty producing the exact same state as your config in question would see in a real execution. Or at least i do. I even asked on several forums and the answer kept boiling down to "Well, it's just not easy. Sometimes not possible." What's the point of it being functional?

Ie yea, i can load up the Eval and call my config func - but what about the params? Well now i have to generate the params. Some of them might be easy, but some are difficult as hell - and if they differ now executing my func in the Eval is not producing the same output (or failing entirely) as it does when i run it "for real".

Nix in practice felt like all of the problems of imperative languages but wrapped in a nice functional wrapper. It was functional without any of the real benefits of functional - to me.

Eg i can't easily get the same input and pass it into a function to produce the same output. To be able to view a function as a simple slice of functionality that i can inspect, debug, etc. They have get access to the entire universe (nixpkgs/etc), a huge stdlib, etc - and you need to recreate all of that if you want to use the function.

Post reply on HN