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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

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?).

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?).