dhall-aws-cloudformation VS tanka

I have been writing a fair amount of Dhall using autogenerated CloudFormation bindings ( https://github.com/jcouyang/dhall-aws-cloudformation/ ). It is a fantastic way to reduce boilerplate and factor out recurring blobs. My main frustration is that the type checker is not smart enough (or maybe the type system is undecidable?) - every time you want to use a polymorphic function, you must pass in the type parameters yourself (this is also true for empty lists and `None`). This makes simple FP idioms extremely noisy, to the point where you're better off writing longhand. In a language that's meant to be alleviating YAML/JSON boilerplate.

It's still a massive improvement, but it could be so much better if the typechecker was smarter.

I am really sad that jsonnet / ksonnet never really took off. It’s a great way to template, but has a bit of a learning curve in my opinion. I suspect that is why it’s niche.

If you like what is presented in this article, take a look at Grafana Tanka (https://tanka.dev).

I keep coming back to tanka (https://tanka.dev/) and hoping it had more traction in the industry.

I would recommend implementing a similar API to Grafana Tanka: https://tanka.dev

When you "synthesise", the returned value should be an array or an object.

1. If it's an object, check if it has an `apiVersion` and `kind` key. If it does, yield that as a kubernetes object and do not recurse.

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

- validation is often impractical (at least identifying exactly where the error is… I’m looking at you Helm!)

Unrelated to OP, but you can leverage Tanka to extend helm charts with functionality not provided by upstream.

https://tanka.dev/

Although jsonette might be considered more complex Tanka is a great alternative for k8s config management.

At Grafana Labs we're using jsonnet at scale, while being a powerful functional language it is also excellent for rendering JSON/YAML config. We have developed Tanka[0] to work with Kubernetes, for other purposes I can recommend this course[1] (authored by me).

[0] https://tanka.dev/

[1] https://jsonnet-libs.github.io/jsonnet-training-course/

If you're hitting the limits of Kustomize, maybe look at Tanka as well.

Yes, try Tanka.