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The programming languages developers use have surprises and inconsistencies like this when you compare between them. It seems awfully pessimistic to think Nix i

The programming languages developers use have surprises and inconsistencies like this when you compare between them. It seems awfully pessimistic to think Nix is too hard to use for things like that. (Although I never really understood people who detested Python's whitespace significance, either). I think it's also a bit impractical. I'd be surprised if anyone refused to use Terraform because they didn't like HCL. (Well, these days there's Pulumi). -- I think Nix's boon to managing packages makes it worth the minor unfamiliarity of a very simple programming language.

dmitriid 5y ago
I refuse to use Terraform, and Pulumi, and many other things :) One-off, poorly specified DSLs with no tool support, no debuggability, bad error reporting etc. are a good thing only in theory. In practice, yes, we often have to use them because there's no other choice. It doesn't mean "oh just get over it, and reap the benefits" is a good argument.
- 1_player 5y ago
  Only Terraform uses a one-off poorly specified DSL. Pulumi is based on real programming languages. The criticism might be that their libraries/API is poorly specified. But the languages it's based upon are standard with all the tooling one's used to.
  - Smaug123 5y ago
    In my (rather limited) experience, the poor specification of Pulumi's libraries is almost entirely down to the fact that they are exposing equally poorly specified functionality from cloud providers.