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Abstraction, not syntax

ruudvanasseldonk.com

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Re: Abstraction, not syntax

#2

Post by JohnMakin »

As someone who's spent most of their career in cloud IAC, and likes to think they are pretty read up on the latest going on in that world, if you didn't know better you'd think YAML is one of the greatest threats facing mankind. There are plenty of things I certainly hate about it, but every configuration syntax I've ever used I have similar gripes about. It's like once a month this kind of "The world is growing tired of yaml" claim is just thrown out there like everyone just agrees with it. Choose something that works for you. This author repeatedly mentions TOML but there are plenty of issues with that one I could point out too. Syntax is one very small part of what makes an ecosystem great or not so great. Most of my exposure to yaml is helm chart templates, which admittedly is not pure YAML, but it works fine enough for me, at least to where I don't feel like writing lengthy blog posts about how much I hate it. I even wrote a library that converts yaml templates to HCL for internal use because I got so sick of people having this exact same argument like it deeply mattered. And guess what? They hate the HCL too.

Re: Abstraction, not syntax

#4

Post by compyman »

JohnMakin wrote: post #2

As someone who's spent most of their career in cloud IAC, and likes to think they are pretty read up on the latest going on in that world, if you didn't know better you'd think YAML is one of the greatest threats facing mankind. There are plenty of things I certainly hate about it, but every configuration syntax I've ever used I have similar gripes about. It's like once a month this kind of "The world is growing tire…

I also think that a lot of the problems with yaml specifically are overblown, but this post is actually not about that!

It is specifically saying the same problem exists in JSON/YAML/TOML, etc, which is that all these configuration languages don't have any real means of abstraction, and ultimately aren't expressive enough do to the job we require of them.

as soon as you are templating config files with other configs, I agree, I have sorely felt this limitation with helm charts

Re: Abstraction, not syntax

#7

Post by apalmer »

I don't think the title and the article really communicates it's case well. Did not understand the goal until 90% through the article when they showed the source code of RCL with the loops.

This isn't syntax vs abstraction. This is how much programming language power do you want to enable in your configuration language. This is a big difference and I think we miss the interesting part of that discussion because we dip into this 'abstraction angle.

Re: Abstraction, not syntax

#8

Post by skydhash »

Defletter wrote: post #5

Really wish people would just bite the bullet and do configuration as code instead of trying to make all these config petlangs.

My preference is towards simpler formats like:

  option value
Easy to edit and manipulate. JSON and YAML is always a nightmare if it's user facing. As for ansible, I'd love to see some scheme/lisp variants.

Re: Abstraction, not syntax

#9

Post by taeric »

patrickmay wrote: post #6
Defletter wrote: post #5

Really wish people would just bite the bullet and do configuration as code instead of trying to make all these config petlangs.

Exactly. Emacs Lisp is an existence proof that this can be done well.

You beat me to it!

And for those that haven't taken a look at it, the "customize" menu and everything it supports is silly impressive. And it just writes out the results out, like a boss.*

* Obviously, it has a lot of "don't edit below this line" complexity to it. But that doesn't change that it is right there.

Re: Abstraction, not syntax

#10

Post by taeric »

JohnMakin wrote: post #2

As someone who's spent most of their career in cloud IAC, and likes to think they are pretty read up on the latest going on in that world, if you didn't know better you'd think YAML is one of the greatest threats facing mankind. There are plenty of things I certainly hate about it, but every configuration syntax I've ever used I have similar gripes about. It's like once a month this kind of "The world is growing tire…

I'm trying to remember the phrase. Something like, "there is nothing as vicious as low stakes fights."

Trying that on Google gets me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law. Is about right. :D

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