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I disagree - I think there are fundamental tradeoffs between declarative and imperative ways of configuration so they'll never "converge" completely. I am a hu

by bbkane 2y ago

I disagree - I think there are fundamental tradeoffs between declarative and imperative ways of configuration so they'll never "converge" completely. I am a huge fan of each camp stealing ideas from the other and thus "converging" closer. I also like the two-step "write imperative code to generate declarative config" approach some systems take - Terraform/Pilumi do this. At the cost of having two steps, you get to write your for loops AND get a declarative "state" you can diff easily with the previous state.

Kinrany 2y ago
Configuration languages are just structured data, and programming languages also need to be able to express complex literal data. JSON is already explicitly designed as a ~subset of JavaScript. An equivalent of a JSON written as a JavaScript literal is easier to read than JSON. The only problem is that we often don't want to use an interpreter to parse data.