Comment by fourthwaveska | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fourthwaveska | Hacker News Reader

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> It doesn’t tell me anything about what you do; and it implies that sysadmins never used to code either.

Back when Luke wrote Puppet, he himself admitted that he was a mediocre developer with a good idea. His premise was that most SysAdmins weren't developers and that they would be more effective with a DSL that wrapped a templating engine and an executor then really learning how to code to build their own tools.

This set just an ugly trend. Next came Chef, which was written by someone (Adam Jacobs) who was pissed off at Luke because he felt entitled to 100% of his time. This was an incredibly dramatic exchange, Puppet Issue #1010 (I can't seem to find any of the old tickets anymore). Adam was making bank off of Puppet consulting, Luke was barely scraping by.

So Chef came along, it was supposed to bridge the gap between Puppet and developers. It was also garbage, but after a few years you could sort of kind of do real development on it.

Then we got Ansible, meh. Salt Stack which was more for managing api driven saas infrastructure but had/has a lot of the bad architectural decisions made by Puppet.

Now we have Terraform, which is OK, but also garbage. On top of that there's the Terraform CDK, which sort of lets you code, but is really just a golang-like DSL that generates HCL or Json. We also have Pulumi, which like the TFCDK, is a golang-like DSL that .. generates HCL to be run by Puppet.

All of this garbage because Luke felt that Sysadmins couldn't code.

> All of this garbage because Luke felt that Sysadmins couldn't code.

If I had a euro any time I heard a sysadmin tell me 'they can't code', only for me to see them write perfectly good Python... A euro for every time a sysadmin tell me they really want to program more, but they think they're underqualified to even start learning, even though they write higher quality, more maintainable and better designed code than most fresh CS grads I've met... But they're stuck writing YAML and HCL and maybe some shell scripts, because that's what the industry tells them they are qualified to do.

Years and years of gatekeeping 'real programmer' jobs behind silly algorithm trivia and CS degrees is to blame, IMO. Ansible-style DevOps is more of the same, pretending that programming is too difficult. So here, have this cursed undebuggable, untestable DSL that is totally not a bespoke programming language.

Man, I am in full agreement with you on every single point. The pure animosity between Dev & Ops was really a negative self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating trope that did a great deal of harm, both emotionally and professionally.

One thing that really helped my teammates and friends was asking them to do code reviews of my work, and them realizing "hey, if I understand this, I can fix it, if I can fix it, I can write it!"

Another was Ruby. Sure, Ruby sucks, but it's easy, almost anything you did just worked. This was why Puppet was written in Ruby (Luke spent months trying to do it in Python, then when he tried Ruby he had a working prototype in 2 or 3 days). Ruby was a great transition language.

> If I had a euro any time I heard a sysadmin tell me 'they can't code', only for me to see them write perfectly good Python... A euro for every time a sysadmin tell me they really want to program more, but they think they're underqualified to even start learning, even though they write higher quality, more maintainable and better designed code than most fresh CS grads I've met

And if i had an euro for every sysadmin who told me "i'm not a developer, you do it", i'd be rich. "Sysadmin" includes Windows-only, GUI-only, ClickOps style admins, which still exist. Do you think they can or want to code? Heck, there are even networking admins that prefer to use GUIs over CLIs!

Not everyone can or wants to write code, even if some people underestimate their skills, some people are afraid.

> Do you think they can or want to code?

Judging by how popular Powershell has become in these 'GUI-only' ecosystems: yes, a lot of them can and want to.

But I'm not saying everyone always should code. I'm saying that not only wrangling Ansible and Terraform is already programming, it's a difficult kind of programming (no tests, no debugger, usually directly on prod), and that we should stop pretending that it's not. That the industry should stop it with the self-fulfilling myth that sysadmins don't want to program by continuing to build 'DevOps' tools centered around lame DSLs. Give sysadmins real programming languages, libraries and guidance on how to program, not shrink-wrapped tools that pretend they're purely configuration driven yet implement a full-blown programming langauge on top of YAML.

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