bcl VS honeysql

Another take on replacing HCL with something more sensible:

BCL https://github.com/wkhere/bcl

I agree with you that HCL sucks when it comes to variables.

Other thing that is funny: no user-defined functions, being unable to use function calls in string interpolations, but allowing variables... so it is like saying: we have this parser and at some points it allows expressions, at some other point not. This seems wrong.

At the same time I agree or at least understand original author's intent to squeeze HCL to maxinum. There is something appealing in HCL visual form, at least when defining resources. Maybe it's just (almost) simplest form of defining such structures that can exists.

This is why I started to work on my own format for configuration, visually similar but with different model of evaluation.

Here is the first attempt: https://github.com/wkhere/bcl

Disclaimer: I named it BCL, 'B' stands for Basic, to somehow relate to HCL and make it easily pronounced. But later I discovered that another BCL is used as Google to configure the Borg platform and seems to be massively hated ;) So I look for the better name..

I am crafting BCL, own configuration language.

https://github.com/wkhere/bcl

I started this when I was unable to squeeze certain usage patterns from HCL, like: variables living in the same scope as the file, evaluating variables in one pass with parsing, easily using external (environment) variables; plus, a simplified syntax.

The implementation is mostly done: you can defined blocks holding key-value pairs and use numerical, string and bool expressions in them. I will add lists and nested blocks.

At this very moment I am rewriting a parser from yacc-based to a Pratt top-down parser with vm, heavily inspired by the excellent book "Crafting Interpreters".

https://github.com/wkhere/bcl

Will not immediately help for all of YAML usages, but at least for defining resources in a Terraform-like style. In fact, it's already it's already helpful as a replacement for HCL in one internal project, that was a final motivation to hack it.

In a bigger picture, I have no idea how to help with YAML omnipresence in Kubernetes. More than a half of my problems in a $daily_job is how crude is consolidating a final Helm chart from different sources. I am not saying that Helm would be inherently a bad tool or my company has chosen pretty bad way of using it - I guess everyone is doing their best considering the ciscumstances. But manipulating textual templates is just too error prone, and the detection of errors happens too late. I dare to say - Kubernetes would do much better with custom format based on a C-like syntax, instead if trying to prove how cool YAML is, especially when it isn't.

Related:

just few days ago I crafted together some ideas i had couple of years already for a configuration language, syntactically like HCL but without HashiCorps idiosyncrasies.

Here it goes, BCL (_Basic_ Configuration Language, for a lack of better name yet), Go prototype, I can code Python port and possibly several other as well..

https://github.com/wkhere/bcl

I recall using korma way back I and I don’t recall it being terrible but I would say https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql has very much superseded it by this point… (but I can see how that might not be obviously clear if one is to look at superficial metrics like GitHub stars for example…)

Joins can certainly work in a data format like YAML. For an example, see Honey SQL from the Clojure community [0] (though without something to contrast strings like Clojure's keywords, you miss out on the automatic parameterization).

You mentioned moving JOINs around, so I'll mention that if represented as structured data, you can move any of the top level components around, so you could more closely follow the "true order of SQL" [1]. For example, I would love to be able to put FROM before SELECT in all or almost all cases. There's also being able to share and add to something like a complicated WHERE clause, where essentially all programming languages have built-in facilities for robustly manipulating ordered and associative data compared to string manipulation, which is not well-suited for the task.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't particularly care for YAML (though it doesn't bother me that much), but as someone who's done their fair share of programmatic SQL creation and manipulation in strings, not having a native way to represent SQL as data is a mistake in my opinion.

0: https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql#big-complicated-exa...

In Clojure-land, we are also using HoneySQL [1] which has similar characteristics. You are still working within SQL semantics so it's a bit more complicated, but we are doing great complicated things with just maps, no API necessary.

[1] https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql

using honeysql we can make structured queries as well

As someone else already pointed out, next.jdbc is good for database connectivity (for Postgres and beyond). For composing the queries themselves, I strongly recommend Honey SQL. It lets you represent queries themselves as normal Clojure data structures, just vectors and maps.

Perhaps you're looking for a way of arranging SQL as an AST represented by data structures (or objects) that can be fed to a compiler. HoneySQL[0] is one such implementation of this idea and it makes your general transformation trivial for Clojure programs. You don't need to mess around with string concatenation because you have a predictable and extensible compiler for data structures (which are themselves easily composable/transformable/storable with Clojure) that you can trust to do the right thing. If you're using some weird database or need an esoteric syntax, extending the compiler to your clause is easy to do[1].

[0] https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql

[1] https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql#extensibility

https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql (write SQL without having to write SQL)

I've used it from Clojure, via HoneySQL, so no ORM, no danger of SQL injection. It was really wonderful!

https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql

I used it to quickly iterate on the development of migration SQL scripts for a MySQL DB, which was running in production on RDS.

I might have switched to H2 DB later, because that was more compatible with MariaDB, but I could use the same Clojure code, representing the SQL queries, because HoneySQL can emit different syntaxes.