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> I've grown rather fond of bash in my current role. I work mainly on developer tools and CI pipelines, both of which mean gluing together lots of different CLI
by eadmund 2y ago
> I've grown rather fond of bash in my current role. I work mainly on developer tools and CI pipelines, both of which mean gluing together lots of different CLI tools. When it comes to this kind of work I think it is quite hard to beat the expressiveness of shell scripting.
Every time I have to express logic in YAML, I miss shell. Shell’s really not great, and it could be improved upon (my vote? Tcl), but it’s so much better than where the industry is these days.
- hollerith 2y agoYou can't use a shell script or a TCL script to generate the YAML file?
- eadmund 2y agoSure, you can generate the YAML file, but it’s not generally possible to trigger that from the system which wants the YAML file, and you don’t get to integrate with the system’s configuration. Often these systems honestly think that their approach of logic-templated YAML is preferable to a script — for example Helm’s templated Kubernetes YAML.
- hamandcheese 2y agoFew things grind my gears worse than _templated_ yaml. It equivalent of building up a json object using only string concatenation. Most people would raise their eyebrows at that, yet templates yaml is seen as very normal. I think in part it's a skills mismatch - a lot of devops/sysadmin type folks I encounter, while very talented, are not prolific coders. So code-forward solutions like jsonnet, starlark, dhall, nix, etc. are rather unfamiliar familiar. It doesn't help that all but one of those languages mentioned are odd little functional languages, increasing the familiarity gap even further.
- hollerith 2y agoThanks.