4 ms·

Your mileage may vary, but Starlark was one of the most complicated languages I've ever read. No types, just layers and layers of indirection, with the goal of

Your mileage may vary, but Starlark was one of the most complicated languages I've ever read. No types, just layers and layers of indirection, with the goal of making a very complex build rule look "simple". I don't like hiding non-accidental complexity, in particular when the abstraction leaks everywhere. Perhaps it was only due to the Starlark I was exposed to (I worked at Google, probably most of the Starlark code I've read has been written by SREs).

kccqzy 2y ago
What you describe is really all large-scale Python projects look like. No types, just layers and layers of indirection, with the goal of making the interface simple and Pythonic while hiding implementation complexity. I don't think this is necessarily a fault given that this language explicitly decides to look like Python (and was in fact simplified from Python). The worst Starlark code I've read has been written not by SREs, but by the Boq team as they have a fetish for accomplishing complicated configuration at build time. This was one of the reasons I've avoided Boq: an incomplete code base that's under development doesn't even begin to build, which is far worse than building something and seeing a real compiler error.
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  > No types It's pretty easy to add types to Python nowadays. I'd consider it bad practice not to do so in a large project.
  - seanmceligot 2y ago
    It would be nice if python would show types in the documentation. Not only do I need that all the time, it would show python was taking type safety serious. For example, knowing the return type of a function is Union[DataFrame,Series] rather than simply DataFrame would save a lot of bad errors.
  - zellyn 2y ago
    Starlark, unfortunately, does not really support (Python style) types yet. Facebook's version has some kind of types, but ideally Starlark would just learn to do mypy types.
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    That's only true for greenfield projects where people start a new project with types in mind. It's absolutely a nightmare for old projects because, without the need to write types, people write all kinds of code that cannot fit within what's possible in python's type annotations.
    - poincaredisk 2y ago
      In my opinion it's a bad practice, and rewriting code to be typeable is a good idea for refactoring. But I write Python for some time now, and I know what you mean. I have nightmares about codebases with dynamically generated class fields for example (though I heard ruby is even worse)
- zellyn 2y ago
  What you describe is really what all programming languages, compilers, interpreters, etc. look like. Layers and layers of indirection, with the goal of making the interface simple while hiding implementation complexity, all the way down to assembly.
dastbe 2y ago
How much of this was how bazel works vs. starlark itself? I find the starlark language is very simple (though inconsistent between the various implementations in bazel, go, and rust) but it takes a bit to understand how the magic between defining rules and implementations works in bazel. and TBH, that is also one place I've really needed auto-completion/static typing in starlark to understand what I can/cannot do.
- tomjakubowski 2y ago
  bazel-lsp gives quite good autocompletion in my experience, for what that's worth. About the only trouble I have still is that sometimes paths in load() calls don't complete properly.

kccqzy 2y ago

What you describe is really all large-scale Python projects look like. No types, just layers and layers of indirection, with the goal of making the interface simple and Pythonic while hiding implementation complexity. I don't think this is necessarily a fault given that this language explicitly decides to look like Python (and was in fact simplified from Python). The worst Starlark code I've read has been written not by SREs, but by the Boq team as they have a fetish for accomplishing complicated configuration at build time. This was one of the reasons I've avoided Boq: an incomplete code base that's under development doesn't even begin to build, which is far worse than building something and seeing a real compiler error.

yodsanklai 2y ago
> No types It's pretty easy to add types to Python nowadays. I'd consider it bad practice not to do so in a large project.
- seanmceligot 2y ago
  It would be nice if python would show types in the documentation. Not only do I need that all the time, it would show python was taking type safety serious. For example, knowing the return type of a function is Union[DataFrame,Series] rather than simply DataFrame would save a lot of bad errors.
- zellyn 2y ago
  Starlark, unfortunately, does not really support (Python style) types yet. Facebook's version has some kind of types, but ideally Starlark would just learn to do mypy types.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  That's only true for greenfield projects where people start a new project with types in mind. It's absolutely a nightmare for old projects because, without the need to write types, people write all kinds of code that cannot fit within what's possible in python's type annotations.
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    In my opinion it's a bad practice, and rewriting code to be typeable is a good idea for refactoring. But I write Python for some time now, and I know what you mean. I have nightmares about codebases with dynamically generated class fields for example (though I heard ruby is even worse)
zellyn 2y ago
What you describe is really what all programming languages, compilers, interpreters, etc. look like. Layers and layers of indirection, with the goal of making the interface simple while hiding implementation complexity, all the way down to assembly.

dastbe 2y ago

How much of this was how bazel works vs. starlark itself? I find the starlark language is very simple (though inconsistent between the various implementations in bazel, go, and rust) but it takes a bit to understand how the magic between defining rules and implementations works in bazel. and TBH, that is also one place I've really needed auto-completion/static typing in starlark to understand what I can/cannot do.

tomjakubowski 2y ago
bazel-lsp gives quite good autocompletion in my experience, for what that's worth. About the only trouble I have still is that sometimes paths in load() calls don't complete properly.