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Comment by iforgot22 | Hacker News Reader

You run into the same problem with config DSLs, except now you're dealing with a DSL. Config is almost never going to be static.

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True. One advantage I can imagine for a DSL is that it constrains what is possible and optimizes (syntactically) what it's supposed to be for. I think that the author of Nix justified its language that way.

The counterargument is "eventually you'll need every facility provided by a programming language, so just start with a programming language."

I'm not sure how I feel about it. The YAML templating situation in Kubernetes is a [shit show][1]. Then again, I did once cave into the temptation of writing a [lisp-like XML preprocessor][2] to make my configurations less verbose. It doesn't have any access to the environment, though, so it's not a general purpose configuration language, just a shorthand for static XML.

[1]: https://www.davidgoffredo.com/no-string-templates

[2]: https://github.com/dgoffredo/llama

What constraints are needed? I've used DSLs that are almost Python but not quite, I think because they were hermetic and deterministic. Even those ended up being produced dynamically using some higher level config DSL or just regular code. Like once you're doing RPCs, it's general programming language territory (though there are also DSLs that do this, which is cursed).

And yes, I have very bad memories of Kubernetes YAML, also YAML itself.

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