cson
dhall-lang
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cson | dhall-lang | |
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1 | 113 | |
1,334 | 4,133 | |
0.1% | 0.5% | |
5.7 | 6.0 | |
4 months ago | about 2 months ago | |
CoffeeScript | Dhall | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License |
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cson
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The Norway Problem
I prefer JSON over YAML because I spend more time confused and burned by the problems caused by it.
I understand that people don't like directly use JSON because it's not very friendly: no comments, no multi-line string, etc.
A great alternative IMHO is cson[0]. It's like JSON to JavaScript but for CoffeeScript (though nobody talks about it nowadays). It has indentation-based syntax, comments, and multiline string which usually don't need to escape. The advantage is it's close enough to JSON which is the canonical format that everybody can agree on nowadays. For YAML and TOML there are too many visual part-aways from JSON.
Or just create a JSON variant that enables comments and the backtick multiline string from JavaScript.
[0] https://github.com/bevry/cson
dhall-lang
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Apple releases Pkl – onfiguration as code language
Fail to see how this is any different than Dhall (https://dhall-lang.org/) other than it produces plists too.
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Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration
Kubernetes config is a decent example. I had ChatGPT generate a representative silly example -- the content doesn't matter so much as the structure:
https://gist.github.com/cstrahan/528b00cd5c3a22e3d8f057bb1a7...
Now consider 100s (if not 1000s) of such files.
I haven't given Pkl an in depth look yet, but I can say that the Industry Standard™ of "simple YAML" + string substitution (with delicate, error prone indentation -- since YAML is indentation sensitive) is easily beat by any of:
- https://jsonnet.org/
- https://nickel-lang.org/
- https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/language/index.html
- https://dhall-lang.org/
- (insert many more here, probably including Pkl)
- Why the fuck are we templating YAML? (2019)
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Is Htmx Just Another JavaScript Framework?
There are underpowered languages / tools, that can only solve a problem for which they are intended poorly. But not all limited tools are like that.
Say, eBPF is prominently not Turing-complete, which allows to guarantee that a eBPF program terminates, and even how soon. Still eBPF is hugely useful in its area.
Or, say, regular expressions are limited to regular languages; in particular, they famously [1] cannot process recursive structures, like trees. Still tools like grep / ag / rg are mightily useful.
Yes, I agree that YAML is underpowered for proper k8s configuration! But it's also too powerful for its own good in other aspects [2]. I wish Google used Dhall [3] or their own purely functional config language (FCL? I already forgot the name) instead of YAML; sadly, they did not.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/223424
[2]: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr...
[3]: https://dhall-lang.org/
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10 Ways for Kubernetes Declarative Configuration Management
Dhall: Dhall is a programmable configuration language that combines features like JSON, functions, types, and import capabilities. Its style leans towards functional programming, so if you're familiar with functional-style languages such as Haskell, you might find Dhall to be quite intuitive.
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Berry is a ultra-lightweight dynamically typed embedded scripting language
I've been thinking along these lines but more 'strongly validated' than statically typed in the sense that you'd be better off being able to load the entire config and then produce a list of problems (and should be able to offer good editor support if done correctly).
Though https://dhall-lang.org/ demonstrates that you can statically type quite a lot of configuration to great advantage, which appears to be programmatically embeddable in multiple languages per https://docs.dhall-lang.org/howtos/How-to-integrate-Dhall.ht...
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What Is the Point of Decidability
> Where practical is in the sense of an engineer (or in their terms, a CS practitioner),
Configuration processing. E.g. I'd like my yamls to be decidable, though I'd settle for guaranteed to halt[1].
[1] https://dhall-lang.org/
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What Is Wrong with TOML?
Maybe you'd like jsonnet: https://jsonnet.org/
I find it particularly useful for configurations that often have repeated boilerplate, like ansible playbooks or deploying a bunch of "similar-but" services to kubernetes (with https://tanka.dev).
Dhall is also quite interesting, with some tradeoffs: https://dhall-lang.org/
A few years ago I did a small comparison by re-implementing one of my simpler ansible playbooks: https://github.com/retzkek/ansible-dhall-jsonnet
- Show HN: FlakeHub – Discover and publish Nix flakes
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Home Blog Better configuration languages – A talk about Dhall [video]
And to checkout Dhall: https://dhall-lang.org/
What are some alternatives?
jsonnet - Jsonnet - The data templating language
cue - CUE has moved to https://github.com/cue-lang/cue
strictyaml - Type-safe YAML parser and validator.
ron - Rusty Object Notation
cue - The home of the CUE language! Validate and define text-based and dynamic configuration
edn - Extensible Data Notation
terraform - Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
jsonlogic - Go Lang implementation of JsonLogic
bip39 - BIP-39 tools using Node and implemented in Coffeescript
nix-gui - Use NixOS Without Coding