dotfiles VS dhall-lang

(taken from https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/master/home-manager/.config/nixpkgs/python-packages.nix) but that did not even download the packages in question.

I had the exact same kernel parameters in my NixOS configuration[0] and after some benchmarks (mostly Emacs-related) I observed a 10-15% speedup, pretty neat.

[0] https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/commit/c0eb0b43083738cab...

Note that when you use LSP with Emacs, installing language servers can quickly lead to dependency hell. I use home-manager[0] to specify which language servers I want installed[1] (among other things such as compilers for different languages) so integration with Emacs is reproducible.

[0] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

[1] https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/bad2e8a29b6622e10bc...

Using Nix and home-manager I'm able to have this setup with Emacs work across Linux and macOS (x86 and arm64) because it compiles the grammars from Nixpkgs itself (the grammar list can also be augmented declaratively with other grammars).

[0] https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/a0f49781ecb05693908...

I recently got into running my own NixOS server—setting up Nextcloud[0], a website[1], DNS server and most recently a mail server[2] were all incredibly easy, in fact, setting up DNS records is more involved than configuring a mail server on NixOS! This was all done on a server with less than 10 GB of disk space as well.

With additional software such as NixOps, personal servers can also be easily spun up and provisioned.

While inevitably there are rough edges if you look deeply enough, I think the default OOTB experience has been incredible for use on a server and as a day-to-day distro. Highly predictable and declarative configurations is the way to go.

[0] https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/ffaaacf8888a5c4167b...

[1] https://siraben.dev

[2] https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

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/