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I see absolutely no point in this. Code is data, and data is code. Why are Ansible users so eager to cripple themselves? Do you know that some people use jin

I see absolutely no point in this. Code is data, and data is code. Why are Ansible users so eager to cripple themselves? Do you know that some people use jinja2 templates to generate their YAML playbooks? Do you know what could have helped them? A real programming language.

moises_silva 11y ago
Power comes at the price of complexity. If you want to write your playbooks in lisp, ansible is not the way to go.
rrauenza 11y ago
This was posted on hacker news sometime ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567408 -> http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/ http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/ I think it is relevant to this discussion. Having used Puppet before ansible, I tend to agree with it.
crdoconnor 11y ago
The point is that it's not turing complete. Thus it's more readable, less susceptible to technical debt and less susceptible to bugs and always by definition, declarative. Turing complete code turns into an unreadable mess far more easily.
- wstrange 11y ago
  But isn't in fact Turing complete? It has variables, control structures, loops and exceptions.
  - jzd 11y ago
    That does not make it Turing complete. "You need some form of dynamic allocation construct (malloc ornew or cons will do) and either recursive functions or some other way of writing an infinite loop. If you have those and can do anything at all interesting, you're almost certainly Turing-complete." -- http://stackoverflow.com/a/449170 http://stackoverflow.com/a/449170
    - wstrange 11y ago
      There is a do-until loop: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_loops.html#id22 https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_loops.html#id22 Which satisfies the infinite loop issue. Have not looked carefully at the dynamic allocation, but I am guessing (hand waving here....) that it could be accomplished.

moises_silva 11y ago

Power comes at the price of complexity. If you want to write your playbooks in lisp, ansible is not the way to go.

rrauenza 11y ago

This was posted on hacker news sometime ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567408 -> http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/ http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/ I think it is relevant to this discussion. Having used Puppet before ansible, I tend to agree with it.

crdoconnor 11y ago

The point is that it's not turing complete. Thus it's more readable, less susceptible to technical debt and less susceptible to bugs and always by definition, declarative. Turing complete code turns into an unreadable mess far more easily.

wstrange 11y ago
But isn't in fact Turing complete? It has variables, control structures, loops and exceptions.
- jzd 11y ago
  That does not make it Turing complete. "You need some form of dynamic allocation construct (malloc ornew or cons will do) and either recursive functions or some other way of writing an infinite loop. If you have those and can do anything at all interesting, you're almost certainly Turing-complete." -- http://stackoverflow.com/a/449170 http://stackoverflow.com/a/449170
  - wstrange 11y ago
    There is a do-until loop: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_loops.html#id22 https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_loops.html#id22 Which satisfies the infinite loop issue. Have not looked carefully at the dynamic allocation, but I am guessing (hand waving here....) that it could be accomplished.