Comment by outworlder
3 hours ago
> It's very error prone to describe a hierarchy of versioned software packages and configuration with shell scripts and yaml.
We have a multitude of configuration/markup languages all doing the exact same thing.
We have solved this problem in the 60s: S-Expressions. Should have just used that for everything. Configuration, code, websites, you name it. Infinitely extendable, easy to parse.
I'm a lisp nerd, but why do you say sexps are the answer here? I think the point of a lot of configuration formats is that they don't want their configuration to also be a full-fledged programming language.
> I think the point of a lot of configuration formats is that they don't want their configuration to also be a full-fledged programming language.
That seems to be everyone's initial goal, but then it inevitably gets leaky.
I think the dominant split here that forces everything into a weird mismash is that nobody really wants to have to understand arbitrary programming language configs for third-party stuff, they want to read config and know what's going on. BUT for their own stuff, they find reasons to want more power and expressibility...
> That seems to be everyone's initial goal, but then it inevitably gets leaky.
This is very much true. And until they do get leaky, you have to wrap them in all sorts of weird templates or other forms of abstraction.
This is one of the reasons I used to really like Chef's config language. It was a Ruby DSL, which meant that anything the DSL couldn't do natively, you could just use Ruby right there.
Of course, this is easily misused, but if you were careful it was as powerful as it was elegant.
> they don't want their configuration to also be a full-fledged programming language.
They say they don't want it but every configurmation format eventually ends up becoming turing complete at some point.
There has been some config languages, like Cue, that are not Turing complete. It is useful of have them always complete and have deterministic evaluation.
Cue also has a lot of schema validation which is better than dynamic languages.