Submitted 9 months ago by canpolat@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev
https://pkl-lang.org/blog/introducing-pkl.html
Disclaimer: I don’t yet understand why this is valuable.
I looked through the yaml example a bit. It looks pretty rough. This really makes familiar and readable yaml into much longer configuration. It’s much harder to read. First impression is a pass.
The big advantage is IDE integration.
You can type price = 42.501 and instantly be told, right there as you edit the file, that you entered an invalid value (too many decimal places for a currency value). You can also be told that you forgot to specify a price.
Finally, the price property can have documentation (by simply using three slashes for your comment, instead of two) which will be visible in most IDEs by simply hovering your mouse over the word “price”.
This is a great project and I’m surprised by the tone of the response here. I think most folks are forgetting that a lot of the folks dealing with configuration are not programmers by trade. They just need to setup a tool for their use case. To that end, the gap between the existing configuration paradigm and extending their software is insurmountable. This bridges that gap in a robust and purpose built way and that simply will improve a lot of people’s lives.
Think about homeassistant and how much less fidly it’d be to get advanced functionality or interfaces if the gap between programming and configuration were closed? There is an absolute fuckton of enterprise and scientific software that will improve in the same way.
Vscode already supports linting yaml against a schema file. Once you start configuring your code with configuration-as-code, you’re just writing more code.
If I need to “generate” some insane config with miles of boilerplate, I would use js to build my json, which can be ported to just about anything. This would replace js in that process.
I’m not sold on the need for this.
Even with something like k8s, I’d reach for pulumi before I put another layer on top of yaml.
Was there anything particularly wrong with json schema? Aside from being a validator and not a “language”.
Json is a nightmare to write.
Compare this pkl code:
host: String port: UInt16(this > 1000)
To the equivalent in json-schema:
{ "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-07/schema#", "type": "object", "properties": { "host": { "type": "string" }, "port": { "type": "number", "minimum": 1000, "exclusiveMinimum": true } }, "required": ["host", "port"] }
I think it’s pretty clear pkl is better.
Nice
I just learned about Pkl, so take this with a grain of salt. JSON Schema and Pkl seem to have some overlap. But JSON schema is not specifically designed for handling configuration and Pkl supports other formats like YAML.
JSON schema supports YAML as well, no? That’s because JSON and YAML are both essentially just different syntaxes for writing the same objects right?
This seems to have many similar ideas as Dhall Lang - dhall-lang.org
cough::bro, do you even NIX?::cough
This looks really interesting. Getting type safety and editor support to configuration may change quite a bit of how things are done. I don’t know if it will gain traction, but if it does, it may really help bringing some long awaited structure to all those YAML files. There appears to be examples specifically for Kubernetes (github.com/apple/pkl-k8s-examples).
Static_Rocket@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You know what, I’m going to say it. I don’t think configuration languages should be turing complete.
taaz@biglemmowski.win 9 months ago
Unpopular opionion(?): this is why I hate Ansible
mac@infosec.pub 9 months ago
Honestly what can be done with Ansible that isn’t achievable with a shell script or two and a yaml file?