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Comment by toolslive | Hacker News Reader

why not use python as the configuration language then ?

Or Scheme :)

One of the motivating cases is working around the Nix language's shortcomings:

> The Nix package manager: Nix is a declarative package manager using its own language for specifying packages. Nickel is inspired in part by the Nix language, while trying to overcome some of its limitations. It could be used instead of the Nix language.

Guix sidesteps this all by just using a proper language with macros for its configuration.

Or GNU Shepherd. With Lisp-based configuration, you get all the power of imperative programming with all the transparency of declarative programming.

- Python isn't sandboxed

- What version of Python? They seem to have abandoned semver and are breaking changes across releases.

Granted, a Lua-like language would work well for some of these situations. Lua does have the "what version" problem.

They didn't abandon semver - semver didnt exist (formally) when python started making breaking changes across releases :)

I was more talking about things like this:

    HOME_DIR = '/home/ubuntu'
    WORK_DIR = HOME_DIR + '/workspace'
    STARTUP_TIME = time.time()
    TIMEOUT = 10 * 60
    PLUGINS = {
        'remoteLogging' : { 
             'server' : '::1', 
             'port': 60000 
        }

It's a bad thing if you're doing big side effects at configuration time (creating directories and such)

Btw, there used to be a sandbox built in into stock python (Bastion), but they abandoned it (IRC because of security issues)

This is essentially what starlark does, although a slightly limited subset of python that's less prone to complicated things (no classes, so no multiple inheritance and no need to do what cue does).

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