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Comment by beders | Hacker News Reader

Can your DevOps read and manipulate code? If no, don't adopt a tool like this. Your Ops guys will hate you.

Furthermore, the code can't be analyzed very well with tools. (aka gradle vs. maven)

You want to make the same change to 20 scripts? Trivial with a declarative language you can parse easily.

Non-trivial if you have code. You better have those re-factoring tools at hand.

If you environment requires complex scripts to get up and running, that is a strong hint that you are not done yet. Can it be simplified further?

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> You want to make the same change to 20 scripts? Trivial with a declarative language you can parse easily.

You have this exactly backwards. You don't need to make the same change to 20 scripts because you have a real programming language; reuse is built-in.

> If you environment requires complex scripts to get up and running, that is a strong hint that you are not done yet. Can it be simplified further?

What options do you have for simplifying YAML except to generate it programmatically?

If your DevOps team can’t code you don’t have a DevOps team, you have an Ops team

this is just wrong. a) it was never about ops writing code b) ops always wrote code.

The "Rule of Least Power" comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power

People forget that the "rule of least power" is "the language with the least power suitable for the task". The question is whether YAML/HCL are suitable for the task to begin with. The following facts all testify that it is not, and that the principle of least power favors "real programming languages":

* CloudFormation hacks things like references, nested-stacks, macros, imports, etc onto YAML

* HCL becomes more powerful with each version

* Helm generates YAML with templates and recently added support for Lua

* AWS is building its CDK, which generates CloudFormation with programming languages

* Things like Terraform and Pulumi exist

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