Dhall-lang Alternatives

dhall-lang reviews and mentions

• Adding algebraic data types to Nickel
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Sep 2024

  Dhall[1] also usually gets mentioned in the same sentence as CUE.

  As for Nickel, I have mixed feelings about it of the same kind as about ES6 classes and perhaps modules—we’re taking a simple language (an extremely simple one, in the case of Nix) and baking into it some stuff that the original had as a completely satisfactory library, in the name of discoverability resp. uniformity. Seems a bit sad and unnecessary to be honest. (The problem of Nixpkgs and NixOS, IMO, is not Nix the language, which is fine for the most part, but the fact that they’re a single giant monorepo with comparatively very little documentation even for the parts that basically serve as the Nix standard library.) Looks like my design sensibilities just align much better with PhD-student Eelco than with Tweag-engineer Eelco.

  [1] https://dhall-lang.org/

• The Dhall Configuration Language
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Sep 2024
• Primitive Recursive Functions for a Working Programmer
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Aug 2024

  Anyway, it is not a problem in practice that this kind of pathological function can be expressed, I just put a limit on the number of execution steps (a “gas limit”, or what the author calls “metered execution”). For keeping code simple, I think the fact that the built-in looping constructs are bounded, and recursion is awkward, are a good nudge, but in the end the most valuable tool is code review and applying good judgment.

      [1]: https://dhall-lang.org/

• Apple releases Pkl – onfiguration as code language
  14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Feb 2024

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

• Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration
  12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Feb 2024

  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)

• Why the fuck are we templating YAML? (2019)
  27 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2024
• Is Htmx Just Another JavaScript Framework?
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jan 2024

  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/

• 10 Ways for Kubernetes Declarative Configuration Management
  23 projects | dev.to | 1 Jan 2024

  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.

• Berry is a ultra-lightweight dynamically typed embedded scripting language
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Oct 2023

  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...

• What Is the Point of Decidability
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Oct 2023

  > 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/

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