And for those that haven't taken a look at it, the "customize" menu and everything it supports is silly impressive. And it just writes out the results out, like a boss.*
* Obviously, it has a lot of "don't edit below this line" complexity to it. But that doesn't change that it is right there.
option value
Lots of config.json is being replaced by the nicer config.ts.
It is good to have a simple, declarative entry point to the build system which records declarative elements of the build. The non-declarative elements of the system are configuration-as-code.
Have used everything from Json to Cue and in-between. Tired of the context switch. Need to use SQL anyway. Fewer dependencies overall required.
This isn't syntax vs abstraction. This is how much programming language power do you want to enable in your configuration language. This is a big difference and I think we miss the interesting part of that discussion because we dip into this 'abstraction angle.
the article talks about the trade off between plain data structure versus abstract ones and that’s the main issue
If you want configuration-as-code use Python. Please. Or Tcl if you must. Do not invent N+1 DSL for your engineers to waste time learning.
JohnMakin•2h ago
compyman•1h ago
It is specifically saying the same problem exists in JSON/YAML/TOML, etc, which is that all these configuration languages don't have any real means of abstraction, and ultimately aren't expressive enough do to the job we require of them.
as soon as you are templating config files with other configs, I agree, I have sorely felt this limitation with helm charts
kmoser•33m ago
There is no single cure-all, of course, but surely we should be relying on computers to do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to validation and verification of these files, not just as linters after the fact but in realtime while we're editing, and with some sort of knowledge (even if derived programmatically) of what is right and what is wrong so we no longer have to worry about simple footguns.
kokada•20m ago
But when working with real programming languages it is completely different, you can take semantic information from the current code, and you can have things like types to give you safety.
taeric•50m ago
Trying that on Google gets me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law. Is about right. :D
skywhopper•31m ago
But anytime someone suggests TOML I have to double check to be sure they are serious because the TOML syntax for anything more complicated than single-layer maps is mind-bogglingly confusing to me. This is not a serious alternative to YAML.