Scaling Configuration: Object Building Languages

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 15:53:40 +0000

YAML, go templated YAML, HOCON, HCL(2), GCL, JSON. Just some of the common languages used for configuring the world we live in, because they need to be human readable, not just machine readable. At first, it’s all fine, but then to ensure consistency and reuse, they add templating features, and the templating languages become more complex to handle the emerging needs as projects require more.

Some evolve to be Turing complete, some specifically eschew Turing completeness, as they need to ensure that at runtime, nothing bad happens. As the templating advances, things get harder to understand and debug as the configuration language rarely provides sufficient tooling. It can be hard to understand what the result of all the templating actually is. Eventually the templates, and sometimes their consumers, become impenetrable. That’s before you get to some of the odd quirks of some of them, to ensure you get the quoting or indentation correct as you’re templating. Either way, as things scale up, configuration gets messy.

Configuration on about:rileycsillag fka drewcsillag

Scaling Configuration: Object Building Languages