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Hard pass. There is a lot of software I am forced to run without wanting to involve myself with it. If your tool is so complex to warrant a need for a full prog

by 9dev 2y ago

Hard pass. There is a lot of software I am forced to run without wanting to involve myself with it. If your tool is so complex to warrant a need for a full programming language in its config files, to me that smells of another issue, but generally I just want a set of knobs to tweak behaviour. I’m so over having to learn Go templates for a metrics exporter, or the need to write booleans as True or False for python apps, or some obscure Erlang syntax for RabbitMQ, or the batshit crazy APT config file syntax, or Apache's weird XML files… Just settle for a simple format and offer to load custom modules for those that need them.

OskarS 2y ago
> but generally I just want a set of knobs to tweak behaviour. But you can do that so easily as well! Like, take this YAML (substitute equivalent JSON or TOML, specific configuration language is irrelevant): options: someOption: 14 nested: foo: "some string" bar: true I don't see how that's so much easier than this version in Lua: options = { someOption = 14, nested = { foo = "some string", bar = true } } And when you do need to get a bit more complex, you have the the tools to manage that complexity. Like, if you have a bunch of very similar things (say, job definitions in CI/CD), you want a way to not repeat yourself so you only have to edit that once, YAML has a tool for that, "anchors" [1]. But it's obscure and a bit hard to use. In a real programming language, it's trivial: just stick the repetitive parts in a variable and use that. Or define a simple function in case most of the stuff is repeated, but some is not, so you can do foo = generateRepetativeConfig('specificOption') Or maybe you can just do that with a simple for-loop. And if you want to do something like a string substitution, you have a whole dang language with the tools you need to do it. Dhall and languages like that are a big improvement, but really, I just want a normal programming language. We have decades of experience now with managing complexity in computer systems, and programming languages have evolved robust systems for handling that. I agree that sandboxing and security can be a real concern for some of this stuff, in which case Starlark is perfect, though you can sandbox languages like Lua or various Lisps as well. [1]: https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/yaml-anchors/ https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/yaml-anch...

by 9dev 2y ago

OskarS 2y ago

> but generally I just want a set of knobs to tweak behaviour. But you can do that so easily as well! Like, take this YAML (substitute equivalent JSON or TOML, specific configuration language is irrelevant): options: someOption: 14 nested: foo: "some string" bar: true I don't see how that's so much easier than this version in Lua: options = { someOption = 14, nested = { foo = "some string", bar = true } } And when you do need to get a bit more complex, you have the the tools to manage that complexity. Like, if you have a bunch of very similar things (say, job definitions in CI/CD), you want a way to not repeat yourself so you only have to edit that once, YAML has a tool for that, "anchors" [1]. But it's obscure and a bit hard to use. In a real programming language, it's trivial: just stick the repetitive parts in a variable and use that. Or define a simple function in case most of the stuff is repeated, but some is not, so you can do foo = generateRepetativeConfig('specificOption') Or maybe you can just do that with a simple for-loop. And if you want to do something like a string substitution, you have a whole dang language with the tools you need to do it. Dhall and languages like that are a big improvement, but really, I just want a normal programming language. We have decades of experience now with managing complexity in computer systems, and programming languages have evolved robust systems for handling that. I agree that sandboxing and security can be a real concern for some of this stuff, in which case Starlark is perfect, though you can sandbox languages like Lua or various Lisps as well. [1]: https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/yaml-anchors/ https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/yaml-anch...