Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

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Looks great! "Zapier for DevOps" would convey it a lot faster. It didn't click for me until I got to that part. I'm excited to try it out!

A couple things:

1) Please, please support some other config file other than just YAML. Even JSON would be an improvement, since you wouldn't have to change your config reader library. YAML has been a miserable nightmare to use in other tools like Open API Spec. I'm not alone in my YAML hate, either[1][2][3][4].

Implicit typing and semantic whitespace in a data file is insane. At least in Python, you're not unlikely to get an error if your whitespace is off. In a config file, you might just end up with dangerous/confusing behavior.

2) I'm surprised you used Relay, which is already used by Facebook. I don't think Facebook is going to care that much, but it's going to be really hard to Google this library.

1. https://dev.to/jessekphillips/stop-using-yaml-3kec

2. https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/why/implicit-typing-removed/

3. https://devopsdays.org/events/2019-stockholm/program/philipp...

4. https://www.arp242.net/yaml-config.html

> 1) Please, please support some other config file other than just YAML.

Although we don't directly advertise it, you can in fact write a workflow in JSON and there's an underlying JSON interchange format that is authoritative in our system. We expect that any other languages we support would "compile" to this JSON format. What other languages are interesting to you? We've looked at CUE[0], HCL, and of course Puppet itself.

[0]: https://cuelang.org/

Also, Relay is built by Puppet, so not a separate company :)

I think the YAML hate is a bit exaggerated. It's not perfect but I would rather write out YAML than JSON or XML.

Besides it seems like this company (Relay) has gone to the effort of making a VScode language extension, which enables autocomplete and syntax checking in the YAML files. Which is cool.

FWIW we didn't make a separate extension, it uses the vscode-yaml extension from Red Hat, you just configure it to associate certain filetypes with our json-schema and custom tags. It is awesome for sure.

https://relay.sh/docs/setting-up-editor/

> Even JSON would be an improvement

JSON is valid YAML, so that should "just work" already. Have you tried it?

I just meant that they could add support for the JSON file extension, since their YAML liv already reads it.

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