Bass – Lisp dialect for scripting the infrastructure beneath your project | Hacker News Reader

Bass – Lisp dialect for scripting the infrastructure beneath your project

bass-lang.org

77 pointsyjftsjthsd-h14 comments

Nice. Similar projects in Common Lisp:

* [Consfigurator](https://spwhitton.name/tech/code/consfigurator/) - Lisp declarative configuration management system. You can use it to configure hosts as root, deploy services as unprivileged users, build and deploy containers, and produce disc images.

* [Adams](https://github.com/cl-adams/adams) - UNIX system administration in Common Lisp. Not unlike Ansible, Chef or Puppet.

Or, you can replace bash with something sane ... aka the Oh shell:

https://github.com/michaelmacinnis/oh

https://www.bsdcan.org/2018/schedule/events/931.en.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1m-WEZz46U

An interesting option in the nix/Docker/ansible space. I'm interested because it uses what at least looks like a normal-enough lisp (nix always felt very NIH to me), and it has shelling out as a first-class feature (possibly my biggest problem with ansible is how much work it is to use the output of a shell command; I miss Chef for that).

Check out Guix, which uses a Scheme dialect (Guile) for scripting.

I may be wrong but it may be based on babashka [1] which is a subset of the clojure runtime natively compiled, and has std IO files available built-in.

1 https://github.com/babashka/babashka

That was my first assumption but it's not babashka underneath - Bass has its own interpreter - but the author clearly has some affection for Clojure's conventions. I do wonder if there wouldn't be more mileage in building this on top of babashka though.

Looks like it takes inspiration from Clojure but isn't (transitively) based on it: https://github.com/vito/bass#kernels-influence

Looks similar to me with https://dagger.io/ but with lisp instead of cue. I’m looking forward to see where this space goes.

"request early access"

I have no idea what this is thing is about. I applied just because I like cue and was curious.

EDIT: I meant this as a critique of the landing page. I don't understand if it's intentionally stealth or if it's hard to find the relevant information (I'm browsing from a phone)

It’s still in stealth mode, which is why I assume it’s invite only for now.

This looks cool – I don’t quite get the notation for the evaluation? Why does {} appear on the “right” but not in the expressions?

And sometimes the {} are JSON syntax with quotes, but sometimes they aren’t?

Very cool. At work we have a lang (hoping to make OSS eventually) which fills this space and is also a lisp at heart, though with some syntax sugar to avoid parens in common cases. It is also closer to GNU make in purpose right now but with a few extra utilities it could fit in CI/CD just as nicely. Exciting time and exciting technologies coming out!

Thank you. It almost makes me cry that someone is pursuing something sane these days.

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