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Starlark is one of those things that reminds you about how trends in computing are totally circular. In the early days, people strung together configuration th

Starlark is one of those things that reminds you about how trends in computing are totally circular. In the early days, people strung together configuration through imperative shell scripts and Lua scripts and the like. Then there was this massive push toward declarative configuration DSLs and configuration-as-code and we got Terraform and a whole mess of YAML in every "cloud-native" open source project. And now we're shifting back to writing configuration imperatively as regular programs with Starlark and similar languages. No doubt another 5 years from now we'll just switch everything back to declarative once programmers get bored of the current trend.

lmm 2y ago
Nonsense. Starlark is hardly a general-purpose programming language. Its whole point is to combine the advantages of something like shell or lua (familiar programming-language-like syntax, easy to reuse common values) with the advantages of something like YAML (safe, inert). That's exactly what real progress looks like.
- theLiminator 2y ago
  Yeah, it's far better than a mess of templated yaml...
asp_hornet 2y ago
This is preposterous take. Bazel is a hermetic build. Depending on the dependency graph of a change we can build, and deploy 2 monoliths and a suite of microservices in under 5 minutes. Sometimes less than 1 minute. Developers also get access to a shared build cache so local builds are just as fast. This isnt a fad. It solves problems you havent encountered yet.
- lopkeny12ko 2y ago
  I never said anything about Bazel, build systems, or build speed. I have no idea what you're trying to refute, perhaps you replied to the wrong comment.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- theLiminator 2y ago
  Yeah, it's ridiculous how people criticize these things, they solve very relevant problems to massive scale software. Working in a monorepo is also especially efficient if the tooling supports it. It's still not perfect, and it's very complicated, but people always act like there's no benefit.
- mypalmike 2y ago
  There's a law that as any discussion on hn grows, the odds that someone chimes in about some new thing being just a rehash of an old thing approaches 1.
dilyevsky 2y ago
Technically with Starlark nothing is stopping you from going mostly declarative with an option to add some imperative customization - see Bazel

lmm 2y ago

Nonsense. Starlark is hardly a general-purpose programming language. Its whole point is to combine the advantages of something like shell or lua (familiar programming-language-like syntax, easy to reuse common values) with the advantages of something like YAML (safe, inert). That's exactly what real progress looks like.

theLiminator 2y ago
Yeah, it's far better than a mess of templated yaml...

asp_hornet 2y ago

This is preposterous take. Bazel is a hermetic build. Depending on the dependency graph of a change we can build, and deploy 2 monoliths and a suite of microservices in under 5 minutes. Sometimes less than 1 minute. Developers also get access to a shared build cache so local builds are just as fast. This isnt a fad. It solves problems you havent encountered yet.

lopkeny12ko 2y ago
I never said anything about Bazel, build systems, or build speed. I have no idea what you're trying to refute, perhaps you replied to the wrong comment.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
theLiminator 2y ago
Yeah, it's ridiculous how people criticize these things, they solve very relevant problems to massive scale software. Working in a monorepo is also especially efficient if the tooling supports it. It's still not perfect, and it's very complicated, but people always act like there's no benefit.
mypalmike 2y ago
There's a law that as any discussion on hn grows, the odds that someone chimes in about some new thing being just a rehash of an old thing approaches 1.

dilyevsky 2y ago

Technically with Starlark nothing is stopping you from going mostly declarative with an option to add some imperative customization - see Bazel