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GitHub actions would suck whatever you "configured" them in, because you are trying to describe a program in a data structure. Ansible makes the same mistake,

GitHub actions would suck whatever you "configured" them in, because you are trying to describe a program in a data structure. Ansible makes the same mistake, as do countless other tools.

tomjakubowski 3y ago
"because you are trying to describe a program in a data structure" (cries in lisp)
- btown 3y ago
  I often wonder if the only reason we haven't used lisp more as a society, and certainly in the devops world, is because our brains find it easier to parse nested indentation than nested parentheses. But in doing so, we've thrown out the other important part of lisp, which is that you can use the same syntax for data that you do for control flow. And so we're stuck in this world where a "modern-looking" program is seen as a thing that must be evaluated to make sense, not a data structure in and of itself. https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1pyg07/why_not_use_indentations_rather_than_numerous/ https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1pyg07/why_not_use_in... is a fascinating 10 year old discussion. And of course, there's Smalltalk, which guided others to a treasure it could not possess. But most younger programmers have never even had these conversations.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    The vast majority of Lisp code is assiduously written with nested indentation! So that can't be it. Non-lisp languages have parentheses, brackets and braces, using indentation to clarify the structure. Nobody can reasonably work with minified Javascript, without reformatting it first to span multiple lines, with indentation. Lisp has great support for indentation; reformatting Lisp nicely, though not entirely trivial, is easier than other languages. Oh, have you seen parinfer? It's an editing mode that infers indentation from nesting, and nesting from indentation (both directions) in real-time. It also infers closing parentheses. You can just delete lines and it reshuffles the closers. The github.io site has animations: https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/ https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/
  - eternityforest 3y ago
    To me it seems a lot of the benefit of declarative programming is just that you can use less powerful tools that don't allow constructs you don't want to have to deal with . LISP seems great for tinkerers and researchers, but not so much corporate devs who want extreme amounts of consistency and predictability, but don't need the absolute most elegant solution.
- kazinator 3y ago
  The best interpretation of weebull's comment is not that describing a program in a data structure is "bad" per se, but that doing that in a configuration language (or requiring configuration constructs to be programming constructs) might not be a hot idea. Even Lisp software that uses Lisp for configuration does not necessarily allow programming in that configuration notation.
- jrockway 3y ago
  Yeah, I think describing a program in a data structure is fine. I honestly prefer it to any syntax that a "real" programming language has brought me. It's so consistent and you can really focus on what you care about. What is unhappy about Github Actions and similar is that your programming language has like 2 keywords; "download a container" and "run a shell script". I would have preferred starting with "func", "handle this error", and "retry this operation if the error is type Foo" ;) Since this article is about helm, I'll point out that Go templates are very lispy. I often have things in them that look like {{ and (foo bar) (bar baz) }} and it only gets crazier as you add more parentheses ;)
  - throwaway894345 3y ago
    The problem I have with GitHub Actions is that I usually want to metaprogram them. I have a monorepo and I want a particular action to run for each "project" subdirectory. I've written a program that generates GitHub Actions YAML files, but all of the ways to make sure the generator was run before each commit are fairly unsatisfying. The problem I have with infra-as-code tools is that what I really want is a pretty simple representation for "the state of the world" that some reconciliation can use, and then I want to generate that stuff in a typesafe, expression-based language like TypeScript or Python (Dhall exists, but its Haskell-like syntax and conventions are too steep a learning curve to get mainstream adoption). Instead we get CloudFormation and Terraform which shoehorn programming language constructs into a configuration language (which isn't strictly an objection to code-as-data generally) or things like Helm which uses text templates to generate a "state of the world" description or these CDKs which all seem to depend on a full JavaScript engine for reasons that don't make sense to me (why do I need JavaScript to generate configuration?).
latchkey 3y ago
> Ansible makes the same mistake, as do countless other tools. My favorite example of this is chown/chmod taking 4-5 lines, in yaml. Sure you can do it a bunch of different ways, sure it allows for repeatable commands. But, it just sucks.
lolinder 3y ago
> you are trying to describe a program in a data structure This describes 100% of software development, though! Programming is just designing data structures that represent some computation. Each language lends itself better to some computations than to others (and some, like YAML, are terrible for describing any kind of computation at all), but they're all just data structures describing programs. The problem isn't that GitHub Actions tries to describe a program in a data structure, the problem is that the language that they chose to represent those programs (YAML and the meta language on top) is ill-suited to the task.
hintymad 3y ago
The same reason I don't like AWS' Step Functions. The spec in JSON is horrible. On the other hand, Step Functions is pretty scalable and reliable and can take practically unlimited throughput. It's a good story for how a product can succeed by getting the primitives right and by removing just the key obstacle for users. Now that Step Functions has gained momentum, they can construct higher-level APIs and SDKs to translate user spec to the low-level JSON/YAML payload.

GitHub actions would suck whatever you "configured" them in, because you are trying to describe a program in a data structure. Ansible makes the same mistake, as do countless other tools.

tomjakubowski 3y ago

"because you are trying to describe a program in a data structure" (cries in lisp)

btown 3y ago
I often wonder if the only reason we haven't used lisp more as a society, and certainly in the devops world, is because our brains find it easier to parse nested indentation than nested parentheses. But in doing so, we've thrown out the other important part of lisp, which is that you can use the same syntax for data that you do for control flow. And so we're stuck in this world where a "modern-looking" program is seen as a thing that must be evaluated to make sense, not a data structure in and of itself. https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1pyg07/why_not_use_indentations_rather_than_numerous/ https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1pyg07/why_not_use_in... is a fascinating 10 year old discussion. And of course, there's Smalltalk, which guided others to a treasure it could not possess. But most younger programmers have never even had these conversations.
- kazinator 3y ago
  The vast majority of Lisp code is assiduously written with nested indentation! So that can't be it. Non-lisp languages have parentheses, brackets and braces, using indentation to clarify the structure. Nobody can reasonably work with minified Javascript, without reformatting it first to span multiple lines, with indentation. Lisp has great support for indentation; reformatting Lisp nicely, though not entirely trivial, is easier than other languages. Oh, have you seen parinfer? It's an editing mode that infers indentation from nesting, and nesting from indentation (both directions) in real-time. It also infers closing parentheses. You can just delete lines and it reshuffles the closers. The github.io site has animations: https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/ https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/
- eternityforest 3y ago
  To me it seems a lot of the benefit of declarative programming is just that you can use less powerful tools that don't allow constructs you don't want to have to deal with . LISP seems great for tinkerers and researchers, but not so much corporate devs who want extreme amounts of consistency and predictability, but don't need the absolute most elegant solution.
kazinator 3y ago
The best interpretation of weebull's comment is not that describing a program in a data structure is "bad" per se, but that doing that in a configuration language (or requiring configuration constructs to be programming constructs) might not be a hot idea. Even Lisp software that uses Lisp for configuration does not necessarily allow programming in that configuration notation.
jrockway 3y ago
Yeah, I think describing a program in a data structure is fine. I honestly prefer it to any syntax that a "real" programming language has brought me. It's so consistent and you can really focus on what you care about. What is unhappy about Github Actions and similar is that your programming language has like 2 keywords; "download a container" and "run a shell script". I would have preferred starting with "func", "handle this error", and "retry this operation if the error is type Foo" ;) Since this article is about helm, I'll point out that Go templates are very lispy. I often have things in them that look like {{ and (foo bar) (bar baz) }} and it only gets crazier as you add more parentheses ;)
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  The problem I have with GitHub Actions is that I usually want to metaprogram them. I have a monorepo and I want a particular action to run for each "project" subdirectory. I've written a program that generates GitHub Actions YAML files, but all of the ways to make sure the generator was run before each commit are fairly unsatisfying. The problem I have with infra-as-code tools is that what I really want is a pretty simple representation for "the state of the world" that some reconciliation can use, and then I want to generate that stuff in a typesafe, expression-based language like TypeScript or Python (Dhall exists, but its Haskell-like syntax and conventions are too steep a learning curve to get mainstream adoption). Instead we get CloudFormation and Terraform which shoehorn programming language constructs into a configuration language (which isn't strictly an objection to code-as-data generally) or things like Helm which uses text templates to generate a "state of the world" description or these CDKs which all seem to depend on a full JavaScript engine for reasons that don't make sense to me (why do I need JavaScript to generate configuration?).

latchkey 3y ago

> Ansible makes the same mistake, as do countless other tools. My favorite example of this is chown/chmod taking 4-5 lines, in yaml. Sure you can do it a bunch of different ways, sure it allows for repeatable commands. But, it just sucks.

lolinder 3y ago

> you are trying to describe a program in a data structure This describes 100% of software development, though! Programming is just designing data structures that represent some computation. Each language lends itself better to some computations than to others (and some, like YAML, are terrible for describing any kind of computation at all), but they're all just data structures describing programs. The problem isn't that GitHub Actions tries to describe a program in a data structure, the problem is that the language that they chose to represent those programs (YAML and the meta language on top) is ill-suited to the task.

hintymad 3y ago

The same reason I don't like AWS' Step Functions. The spec in JSON is horrible. On the other hand, Step Functions is pretty scalable and reliable and can take practically unlimited throughput. It's a good story for how a product can succeed by getting the primitives right and by removing just the key obstacle for users. Now that Step Functions has gained momentum, they can construct higher-level APIs and SDKs to translate user spec to the low-level JSON/YAML payload.