4 ms·

> I know some people might consider this insanity Some people here still can’t believe YAML is used for not only configuration, but complex code like optimized

by baq 2y ago

> I know some people might consider this insanity Some people here still can’t believe YAML is used for not only configuration, but complex code like optimized CI pipelines. This is insane. You’re actually introducing much needed sanity into the process by admitting that a real programming language is the tool to use here. I can’t imagine the cognitive dissonance Lisp folks have when dealing with this madness, not being one myself.

mschuster91 2y ago
> Some people here still can’t believe YAML is used for not only configuration, but complex code like optimized CI pipelines. This is insane. It's miles better than Jenkins and the horrors people created there. GitLab CI can at least be easily migrated to any other GitLab instance and stuff should Just Work because it is in the end not much more than self contained bash scripts, but Jenkins... is a clown show, especially for Ops people of larger instances. On one side, you got 50 plugins with CVEs but you can't update them because you need to find a slot that works for all development teams to have a week or two to fix their pipelines again, and on the other side you got a Jenkins instance for each project which lessens the coordination effort but you gotta worry about dozens of Jenkins instances. Oh and that doesn't include the fact many old pipelines aren't written in Groovy or, in fact, in any code at all but only in Jenkins's UI... Github Actions however, I'd say for someone coming from GitLab, is even worse to work with than Jenkins.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> I can’t imagine the cognitive dissonance Lisp folks have when dealing with this madness, not being one myself. After a decade trying to fight it, this one Lisper here just gave up. It was the only way to stay sane. I remain hopeful that some day, maybe within our lifetimes, the rapid inflation phase of software industry will end, and we'll have time to rethink and redo the fundamentals properly. Until then, one can at least enjoy some shiny stuff, and stay away from the bleeding edge, aka. where sewage flows out of pipe and meets the sea. (It's gotten a little easier now, as you can have LLMs deal with YAML-programming and other modern worse-is-better "wisdom" for you.)
motorest 2y ago
> Some people here still can’t believe YAML is used for not only configuration, but complex code like optimized CI pipelines. I've been using YAML for ages and I never had any issue with it. What do you think is wrong with YAML?
- mst 2y ago
  Turing complete YAML ends up being an app specific terrible programming language. Many of us would rather use a less terrible programming language instead.
  - motorest 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - hadlock 2y ago
    Something went horribly wrong if your coworkers are putting switching logic inside your config
- hadlock 2y ago
  I've been using YAML professionally for a decade and other than forgetting to wrap some values in quotes, has been an absolute non issue. Some people talk about YAML being a turing complete language, if people try to do that in your CI/CD system just fire them I'll allow helm style templating but that's about it.
no_wizard 2y ago
I'm shocked there isn't a 'language for config' that hasn't become the de facto standard and its YAML all the way down seemingly. I am with you 100%. It would really benefit from a language that intrinsically understood its being used to control a state machine. As it is, that is what nearly all folks want in practice is a way to run different things based on different states of CI. A lisp DSL would be perfect for this. Macros would make things alot easier in many respects. Unfortunately, there's no industry consensus and none of the big CI platforms have adopted support for anything like that, they all use variants of YAML (I always wondered who started it with YAML and why everyone copied that, if anyone knows I'd love to read about it). Honestly, I can say the same complaints hold up against the cloud providers too. Those 'infrastructure as code' SDKs really don't lean into the 'as code' part very well
- mdaniel 2y ago
  > (I always wondered who started it with YAML and why everyone copied that, if anyone knows I'd love to read about it). I know this isn't a definite answer to your question, but it was still super interesting to me and hopefully it will inspire someone else to dig into finding the actual answer The best guess I have as far as CI/CD specifically appears to be <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_CI#:~:text=travis%20ci%20was%20the%20first%20ci%20service%20that%20provided%20services%20to%20open-source%20projects%20for%20free%20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_CI#:~:text=travis%20ci%...> which launched in 2011 offering free CI and I found a reference to their .travis.yml in GitLab's repo in 2011, too - CruiseControl (2004) was "ant as a service," so it was XML https://web.archive.org/web/20040812214609/http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/Getting+Started+With+CruiseControl https://web.archive.org/web/20040812214609/http://confluence... - Hudson (2007) https://web.archive.org/web/20140701020639/https://www.java.net//blog/kohsuke/archive/20070514/Hudson%20J1.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140701020639/https://www.java.... was also XML, and was by that point driving Maven 2 builds (also XML) - I was shocked that GitHub existed in 2008 https://web.archive.org/web/20081230235955/http://github.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081230235955/http://github.com... with an especial nod to no longer a pain in the ass and Not only is Git the new hotness, it's a fast, efficient, distributed version control system ideal for the collaborative development of software but this was just "for funsies" link since they were very, very late to the CI/CD game - I was surprised but k8s 1.0.0 still had references to .json PodSpec files in 2010 https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/v1.0.0/examples/storm/zookeeper.json https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/v1.0.0/example... - cloud-init had yaml in 2010 https://github.com/openstack-archive/cloud-init/blob/0.7.0/doc/examples/cloud-config-gluster.txt https://github.com/openstack-archive/cloud-init/blob/0.7.0/d... so that's a plausible "it started here" since they were yaml declarations of steps to perform upon machine boot (and still, unquestionably, my favorite user-init thing) - just for giggles, GitLab 1.0.2 (2011) didn't even have CI/CD https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/tree/v1.0.2 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/tree/v1.0.2 -- however, while digging into that I found .travis.yml in v2.0.0 (also 2011) so that's a very plausible citation <https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v2.0.0/.travis.yml https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v2.0.0/.travis.y...> - Ansible 1.0 in 2012 was also "execution in yaml" https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.0/examples/playbooks/get_url.yml https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.0/examples/playbo...

by baq 2y ago

mschuster91 2y ago

> Some people here still can’t believe YAML is used for not only configuration, but complex code like optimized CI pipelines. This is insane. It's miles better than Jenkins and the horrors people created there. GitLab CI can at least be easily migrated to any other GitLab instance and stuff should Just Work because it is in the end not much more than self contained bash scripts, but Jenkins... is a clown show, especially for Ops people of larger instances. On one side, you got 50 plugins with CVEs but you can't update them because you need to find a slot that works for all development teams to have a week or two to fix their pipelines again, and on the other side you got a Jenkins instance for each project which lessens the coordination effort but you gotta worry about dozens of Jenkins instances. Oh and that doesn't include the fact many old pipelines aren't written in Groovy or, in fact, in any code at all but only in Jenkins's UI... Github Actions however, I'd say for someone coming from GitLab, is even worse to work with than Jenkins.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> I can’t imagine the cognitive dissonance Lisp folks have when dealing with this madness, not being one myself. After a decade trying to fight it, this one Lisper here just gave up. It was the only way to stay sane. I remain hopeful that some day, maybe within our lifetimes, the rapid inflation phase of software industry will end, and we'll have time to rethink and redo the fundamentals properly. Until then, one can at least enjoy some shiny stuff, and stay away from the bleeding edge, aka. where sewage flows out of pipe and meets the sea. (It's gotten a little easier now, as you can have LLMs deal with YAML-programming and other modern worse-is-better "wisdom" for you.)

motorest 2y ago

> Some people here still can’t believe YAML is used for not only configuration, but complex code like optimized CI pipelines. I've been using YAML for ages and I never had any issue with it. What do you think is wrong with YAML?

mst 2y ago
Turing complete YAML ends up being an app specific terrible programming language. Many of us would rather use a less terrible programming language instead.
- motorest 2y ago
  [flagged]
- hadlock 2y ago
  Something went horribly wrong if your coworkers are putting switching logic inside your config
hadlock 2y ago
I've been using YAML professionally for a decade and other than forgetting to wrap some values in quotes, has been an absolute non issue. Some people talk about YAML being a turing complete language, if people try to do that in your CI/CD system just fire them I'll allow helm style templating but that's about it.

no_wizard 2y ago

I'm shocked there isn't a 'language for config' that hasn't become the de facto standard and its YAML all the way down seemingly. I am with you 100%. It would really benefit from a language that intrinsically understood its being used to control a state machine. As it is, that is what nearly all folks want in practice is a way to run different things based on different states of CI. A lisp DSL would be perfect for this. Macros would make things alot easier in many respects. Unfortunately, there's no industry consensus and none of the big CI platforms have adopted support for anything like that, they all use variants of YAML (I always wondered who started it with YAML and why everyone copied that, if anyone knows I'd love to read about it). Honestly, I can say the same complaints hold up against the cloud providers too. Those 'infrastructure as code' SDKs really don't lean into the 'as code' part very well

mdaniel 2y ago
> (I always wondered who started it with YAML and why everyone copied that, if anyone knows I'd love to read about it). I know this isn't a definite answer to your question, but it was still super interesting to me and hopefully it will inspire someone else to dig into finding the actual answer The best guess I have as far as CI/CD specifically appears to be <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_CI#:~:text=travis%20ci%20was%20the%20first%20ci%20service%20that%20provided%20services%20to%20open-source%20projects%20for%20free%20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_CI#:~:text=travis%20ci%...> which launched in 2011 offering free CI and I found a reference to their .travis.yml in GitLab's repo in 2011, too - CruiseControl (2004) was "ant as a service," so it was XML https://web.archive.org/web/20040812214609/http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/Getting+Started+With+CruiseControl https://web.archive.org/web/20040812214609/http://confluence... - Hudson (2007) https://web.archive.org/web/20140701020639/https://www.java.net//blog/kohsuke/archive/20070514/Hudson%20J1.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140701020639/https://www.java.... was also XML, and was by that point driving Maven 2 builds (also XML) - I was shocked that GitHub existed in 2008 https://web.archive.org/web/20081230235955/http://github.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081230235955/http://github.com... with an especial nod to no longer a pain in the ass and Not only is Git the new hotness, it's a fast, efficient, distributed version control system ideal for the collaborative development of software but this was just "for funsies" link since they were very, very late to the CI/CD game - I was surprised but k8s 1.0.0 still had references to .json PodSpec files in 2010 https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/v1.0.0/examples/storm/zookeeper.json https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/v1.0.0/example... - cloud-init had yaml in 2010 https://github.com/openstack-archive/cloud-init/blob/0.7.0/doc/examples/cloud-config-gluster.txt https://github.com/openstack-archive/cloud-init/blob/0.7.0/d... so that's a plausible "it started here" since they were yaml declarations of steps to perform upon machine boot (and still, unquestionably, my favorite user-init thing) - just for giggles, GitLab 1.0.2 (2011) didn't even have CI/CD https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/tree/v1.0.2 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/tree/v1.0.2 -- however, while digging into that I found .travis.yml in v2.0.0 (also 2011) so that's a very plausible citation <https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v2.0.0/.travis.yml https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v2.0.0/.travis.y...> - Ansible 1.0 in 2012 was also "execution in yaml" https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.0/examples/playbooks/get_url.yml https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.0/examples/playbo...