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Give a programmer a non-Turing complete language and they will use a Turing complete language to compile down to it. When a program is only configurable in YAML

Give a programmer a non-Turing complete language and they will use a Turing complete language to compile down to it. When a program is only configurable in YAML, someone will use jinja2 to generate it so they can have loops. SASS exists because CSS isn't expressive enough. Etc. etc. etc. I just really don't subscribe to purposely limiting expressive power via non-Turing completeness. I've never wanted to do this in my own software and it's only ever been a roadblock for me to route around as a user. Spent a lot of time in DevOps where this sort of thing is rampant.

nine_k 3y ago
There are underpowered languages / tools, that can only solve a problem for which they are intended poorly. But not all limited tools are like that. Say, eBPF is prominently not Turing-complete, which allows to guarantee that a eBPF program terminates, and even how soon. Still eBPF is hugely useful in its area. Or, say, regular expressions are limited to regular languages; in particular, they famously [1] cannot process recursive structures, like trees. Still tools like grep / ag / rg are mightily useful. Yes, I agree that YAML is underpowered for proper k8s configuration! But it's also too powerful for its own good in other aspects [2]. I wish Google used Dhall [3] or their own purely functional config language (FCL? I already forgot the name) instead of YAML; sadly, they did not. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/223424 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/223424 [2]: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr... [3]: https://dhall-lang.org/ https://dhall-lang.org/