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Comment by aarmenaa | Hacker News Reader

FTA:

> The Fix: Use a full modern programming language, with its existing testing frameworks and tooling.

I was reading the article and thinking myself "a lot of this is fixed if the pipeline is just a Python script." And really, if I was to start building a new CI/CD tool today the "user facing" portion would be a Python library that contains helper functions for interfacing with with the larger CI/CD system. Not because I like Python (I'd rather Ruby) but because it is ubiquitous and completely sufficient for describing a CI/CD pipeline.

I'm firmly of the opinion that once we start implementing "the power of real code: loops, conditionals, runtime logic, standard libraries, and more" in YAML then YAML was the wrong choice. I absolutely despise Ansible for the same reason and wish I could still write Chef cookbooks.

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I don't think I agree. I've now seen the 'language' approach in jenkins and the static yaml file approach in gitlab and drone. A lot of value is to be gained if the whole script can be analysed statically, before execution. E.g. UI Elements can be there and the whole pipeline is visible, before even starting it.

It also serves as a natural sandbox for the "setup" part so we can always know that in a finite (and short) timeline, the script is interpreted and no weird stuff can ever happen.

Of course, there are ways to combine it (e.g. gitlab can generate and then trigger downstream pipelines from within the running CI, but the default is the script. It also has the side effect that pipeline setup can't ever do stuff that cannot be debugged (because it's running _before_ the pipeline) But I concede that this is not that clear-cut. Both have advantages.

If you manage to avoid scope creep then sure, static YAML has advantages. But that's not usually what happens, is it? The minute you allow users to execute an outside program -- which is strictly necessary for a CI/CD system -- you've already lost. But even if we ignore that, the number of features always grows over time: you add variables so certain elements can be re-used, then you add loops and conditionals because some things need to happen multiple times, and then you add the ability to do math, string manipulation is always useful, and so on. Before you know it you're trying to solve the halting problem because your "declarative markup" is a poorly specified turing-complete language that just happens to use a YAML parser as a tokenizer. This bespoke language will be strictly worse than Python in every way.

My argument is that we should acknowledge that any CI/CD system intended for wide usage will eventually arrive here, and it's better that we go into that intentionally rather than accidentally.

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