homies VS dhall-lang

This is awesome! I utilize `nix` on Linux and Mac but I haven't "drank the kool-aid" so I utilize `nix profile` and a makefile:

https://github.com/sontek/homies/blob/master/justfile

Fleek basically replaces my hacked together work flow with something that I'd actually utilize on a daily basis! Nix shouldn't be an all or nothing thing and this is one step closer to making it a generally available set of technology.

I see a lot of people mentioning home-manager / nix in the comments. I tried drinking the nix kool-aid and home-manager and all that was a little too much more me and landed on a hybrid approach:

https://github.com/sontek/homies

1. I use a `justfile` that calls `nix profile install ...` to install my packages, rather than using a nix configuration file. This allows me to use a standard package manager workflow rather than going "all in".

https://github.com/sontek/homies/blob/master/justfile#L24-L2...

2. I then use GNU Stow to install my dotfile configuration:

https://github.com/sontek/homies/blob/master/justfile#L93-L9...

I think this is a great middle ground where I can utilize `nix` as my package manager across Linux and Mac and have consistency while not having to learn the whole configuration language or change my workflow.

The other tools I use heavily in my environment:

- https://asdf-vm.com/: I find this better than installing python/node/etc from nix.

- https://github.com/casey/just: I use this as my command runner (similar to make but cleaner in my opinion)

Yeah, I think its things like this that make it hard to adopt nix. All I want is a way to say "I want jq, kubectl, and terraform installed" and have it available globally. Not for specific projects or anything like that.

Right now I maintain a makefile that installs everything for me using `nix profile`:

https://github.com/sontek/homies/blob/master/justfile#L14-L2...

Which almost exactly like I want. Only issue is sometimes a new hash is generated (which I don't understand.. maybe a config update in the repos?) and the makefile can't run anymore:

    error: packages '/nix/store/y65pp5hipid0fzxl1z7xjxdk4h9jwfw7-exa-0.10.1/bin/exa' and '/nix/store/gy0bqcs9mcan8af47wakdylhal67dpy4-exa-0.10.1/bin/exa' have the same priority 5; use 'nix-env --set-flag priority NUMBER INSTALLED_PKGNAME' to change the priority of one of the conflicting packages (0 being the highest priority)

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

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)

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...

> 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/

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

And to checkout Dhall: https://dhall-lang.org/