this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Programming
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I agree - YAML is not suitable for complex cases that people use it in, like ~~Terraform~~ and Home Assistant. My pet peeve is a YAML config in a situation that really calls for more abstraction, like functions and variables. I'd like to see more use of the class of configuration languages that support that stuff, like Dhall, Cue, and Nickel.
There is another gotcha which is that YAML has more room for ambiguity than, say, JSON. YAML has a lot of ways to say
trueandfalse, and it's implicit quoting is a bit complex. So some values that you expect to be strings might be interpreted as something els.What YAML does Terraform use? HCL is similar but different enough to YAML.
Oh, thanks for calling that out. I think I may have mixed up some of the frustrations I experienced at an old job.
Maybe you're thinking of Ansible?
Yes, there's a good example. Ansible would make more sense if its configuration language was Nix...
But if one is already using nix, then just use nix
For those highly complex situations is Lua still viewed as the ideal solution? Lua is sort of legendary for game configuration and seems to strike a good expressiveness/accessibility balance for modders and the casually technical.
I think it depends. Lua is great for scripting - like when X happens do Y. I agree that makes sense for a case like Home Assistant. Sometimes you really want the result to be a data structure, not an interactive program, in which case I think more sophisticated configuration (as opposed to scripting) languages might be better.