lens VS dhall-lang

They are in fact well structured and not random at all. Take a look at this:

https://github.com/ekmett/lens/wiki/Operators

The documentation of lenses is geared towards people know what lenses are. Of course this single fragment of documentation doesn't make sense if you don't know what lenses are. If you want to understand what lenses are the package links to a helpful wiki and tutorial: https://github.com/ekmett/lens/wiki/Overview

All within reach within seconds of discovering the function.

Fail to see how this is any different than Dhall (https://dhall-lang.org/) other than it produces plists too.

Well, Dhall provides something between JSON and a Turing complete language that can make a lot of configuration much quicker to write, if you can hack the functional syntax.

http://dhall-lang.org/

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)

Indeed why? However the conclusion I have is not to use JSON but to use a type safe configuration language that can express my intent much better making illegal states impossible. One example of such lang is Dhall.

https://dhall-lang.org/

Throwing in a plug for https://dhall-lang.org/

> Dhall is a programmable configuration language that you can think of as: JSON + functions + types + imports

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/

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.

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...

I agree, I quite like https://dhall-lang.org/ for that reason. It strikes a good balance between features and being a config language.