pyinfra VS dhall-lang

I like https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra. "pyinfra automates infrastructure using Python"

Only played with it for a little but it seems well designed an simpler alternative to ansible, chef and other such things.

Haven't used it in anger yet, but I have high hopes for PyInfra: https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra

pyinfra - https://pyinfra.com/ - Pyinfra is simpler for me than Ansible. I completed the entire deployment in one afternoon, from installing and configuring the VPS server from scratch to deploying the application and automatically restoring the database from a backup.

I’ve replaced Ansible with PyInfra where ever possible. https://pyinfra.com/ is very clean, and fast but lacks the shear amount of automation that can be found with Ansible.

Some folks don't like YAML all that well, and I can understand where they are coming from. I wish Ansible provided a good Python API so that playbooks could be written in Python easier. But there is a project called PyInfra that is trying to do something similiar to Ansible, using Python as the configuration language. https://pyinfra.com/ It is still pretty new so not got nearly as many modules written for it yet.

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/