yamllint VS dhall-lang

yamllint, as the name suggests, is a linter for YAML files. It checks syntax validity, as well as looking for more-complex errors like key repetition and cosmetic problems such as line length, trailing spaces, indentation etc. This one was indly recommended by yankdevil.

StrictYAML removes features that might be useful for some usecases, such as Node anchors+Refs and Flow Style.

I don't think the cost of an additional standard is worth it in this case.

While YAML has issues, they aren't much of problem if you use a linter, such as yamllint [1].

1. https://github.com/adrienverge/yamllint

On top of the above-mentioned tools, it's also a good idea to use YAML linter such this one or its CLI equivalent, which will validate and cleanup your documents.

yamlfixer automates the fixing of problems reported by yamllint by parsing its output.

repos: - repo: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks rev: v4.0.1 hooks: - id: check-added-large-files - id: check-ast - id: check-builtin-literals - id: check-case-conflict - id: check-docstring-first - id: check-executables-have-shebangs - id: check-json - id: check-merge-conflict - id: check-symlinks - id: check-toml - id: check-vcs-permalinks - id: check-xml - id: check-yaml args: [--allow-multiple-documents] - id: debug-statements - id: detect-aws-credentials args: [--allow-missing-credentials] - id: destroyed-symlinks - id: end-of-file-fixer - id: fix-byte-order-marker - id: fix-encoding-pragma args: [--remove] - id: forbid-new-submodules - id: mixed-line-ending args: [--fix=auto] - id: name-tests-test args: [--django] - id: requirements-txt-fixer - id: trailing-whitespace - repo: local hooks: - id: black name: black entry: poetry run black language: system types: [python] - id: flake8 name: flake8 entry: poetry run flake8 language: system types: [python] - repo: https://github.com/pycqa/isort rev: "5.9.1" hooks: - id: isort args: - --profile - black - --filter-files - repo: https://github.com/adrienverge/yamllint.git rev: v1.26.1 hooks: - id: yamllint args: [-c=.yamllint.yaml] - repo: https://gitlab.com/devopshq/gitlab-ci-linter rev: v1.0.2 hooks: - id: gitlab-ci-linter args: - "--server" - "https://your.gitlab.server" # Need env var GITLAB_PRIVATE_TOKEN with gitlab api read token - repo: https://github.com/commitizen-tools/commitizen rev: v2.17.11 hooks: - id: commitizen stages: [commit-msg] - repo: https://github.com/jumanjihouse/pre-commit-hooks rev: 2.1.5 # or specific git tag hooks: - id: forbid-binary - id: shellcheck - id: shfmt

If you wanted a linter.

Or, run Yamllint externally. I do this, because I have more control: https://github.com/adrienverge/yamllint

You can catch this with yamllint (https://github.com/adrienverge/yamllint):

    % cat countries.yml

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/