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Comment by krzychh | Hacker News Reader

so we're reinventing lisp yet again?

I have been looking into alternatives to YAML templating, the Helm abomination, etc. and was utterly surprised how no one ever apparently has thought to create a configuration/templating system that's basically a fancy library on top of Scheme.

I truly believe every company is still reinventing the wheel because of a lack of serious foundational knowledge in most engineers, so they are doomed to recreate subpar, shitty alternatives.

Yeah was thinking about that a lot, too. I guess there’s zero overlap between schemers/lispers and people doing yaml configs.

There are dozens of us!

More seriously, I don’t understand how anyone tolerates 5k line yaml files but I haven’t found any support for moving away from it at $bigcorp. Right now we use an undocumented shim layer between Helm and Argo for maximum inscrutable templating. It’s an endless footgun with the impact spread so thin it’s invisible to the business.

> was utterly surprised how no one ever apparently has thought to create a configuration/templating system that's basically a fancy library on top of Scheme.

There's Clojure's extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

edn + clojure was the most pleasant configuration system I've worked with, but I have never convinced anybody else to use it. Jsonnet on the other hand, people get productive in it pretty quickly. It's my default choice for all configuration now.

I wonder, what would happen if Clojure was marketed as a configuration file format from the very start, without mentioning persistent immutable data structures, software transactional memory, and other scary words. Would it have more adoption now?

I doubt it; edn seemed like _that_ rebranding effort. It looked json-like enough, but clearly didn't have the draw. People who complain that json has no comments obviously have a secret list of other gripes.

The general tooling wasn't there, apart from clojure. I tried one of the edn libs for python/node and it always felt second class. The full power was just never there outside of clojure projects.

It's like how everybody still uses QWERTY (including me) and are happy to buy better keyboards, but they must still be in QWERTY

It seems cool at first sight, but I feel it is overengineered for a configuration language: why would one need to indicate whether a variable is a list, a vector or a set? These are implementation details, they should be represented as lists, and it is the application underneath that choses the appropriate representation.

You only need Scheme, quoting and quasi-quoting, and s-expressions.

    `((username "foo")
      (password ,(getenv "PASS")))

Want to be fully declarative because you are afraid of Turing-complete configs? Simply abort if the top-level list is quasi-quoted.

what about guix? could that be used for this purpose?

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