3 ms·

Way back this was a solid way of systems management, write a collection of packages that did things and then system config would be a matter of installing a lis

• TeMPOraL 3y ago
  System as declarative configuration? It sure does seem we've been spinning in circles for the past few decades, creating a complexity stack of failed attempts at solving the same problems. Wonder how much of that is social. E.g. processes and function calls are effectively equivalent: command line arguments are effectively positional or named parameters, while environmental variables are equivalent to dynamic binding - a powerful technique all but excised from programming languages, except for the Lisp family. And yes, this makes the shell a REPL. The main difference between a program and a function then feels like the relationship with programmers: a program is expected to be a named thing to distribute and sign with your name; a function is more ephemeral. But does this difference warrant having each in a separate, distinct, complex layer?