alt Hacker NewsThings I don't like in configuration languages
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I wonder if "the right solution" is a programming language that is fast, concise, trivially easy to run, and outputs some efficient binary format like protobuf.
Programming languages have comments and control flow, multiple popular implementations, and can have nice literals. Lack of Turing completeness is actually not a terribly useful feature if you trust the input (and you should probably just use protobufs or similar for untrusted inputs in that case.)
In the world of human-readable data formats (ie not programming languages), the best one I ever used was Jane Street's sexplib[1] s-expression format.
It was concise and expressive. There was a direct way to describe variants (types with multiple constructors), which is always awkward in JSON, but the format was still surprisingly low-noise for reading and editing by hand. I remember you could even use it as a lightweight markup format:
(here is some text with (em formatting) information)
And, unlike certain other formats I won't name, it has comments!
It also helps that Emacs with Paredit makes editing s-expressions flow. The tool doesn't need to know anything about the sexplib format specifically; just relying on basic s-expression structure gives us fluid but simple structural editing.
I am constantly sad that nobody else uses this sort of format, and I have to deal with a mixture of JSON, YAML, TOML and other ad-hoc formats instead.
There is also .ini, it's simpler than toml, though has more inconsistent implementations and formats. But the '[[table]]' is just '[table]' and I like the '[table.subtable]' syntax better.
But since we're criticizing formats ;-) maml https://maml.dev is fairly good good.
* I like multiline blocks and comment style
* I do not like optional commas, either require them or not. I'd lean toward requiring them.
* Not sure about ordered object keys. How should languages represent that, a map/dict kind of a data structure won't work it would have to be an ordered dict/list of kvs etc. Two objects {"a":"x", "b":"y"} and {"b":"y", "a":"x"} will be different then. I get the idea, but I am leaning toward not liking it by the time I finished typing all that.
* I like booleans and null. Good for not having ons and offs those are just annoying.
What is the name of the style found in (e.g.) ISC BIND9:
* https://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch6/#master
* https://bind9.readthedocs.io/en/latest/manpages.html#named-c...
ISC-style? (E/A)BNF-ish?
Personally I like (a) the open/close braces for better stanza navigation, (b) all statements/lines ending with semicolon.
(Something similar was used in (now-EOL) ISC DCHPd, and they've moved to "extended JSON" for their new DHCP server, KEA.)
No mention of The Configuration Complexity Clock [1] which I always think deserves a link, but credit to the author for actually keeping it slim and readable over (IMHO) most of the newer additions to the landscape which either declare themselves as 'obvious' and aren't or just add features such as Pkl's extends keyword, moving us further round the complexity clock.
Of course just adding multiline strings is the start of the rabbit hole, now you need to think about leading line breaks, trailing line breaks, intermediate line breaks, whitespace chomping, and- oh heavens I've reinvented YAML, I think I need to lie down.
[1] https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-comple...
I don't like this article all that much but I do like the MAML format the author wrote this to promote. It seems like it’s everything that’s good about JSON, plus everything fixed for human writing, and nothing more.
Hats off, wish my package.json and build.yml were package.maml and build.maml.
I've actually been getting a lot of mileage out of textproto: https://protobuf.dev/reference/protobuf/textformat-spec/
Well typed, simple syntax. Maps are annoying though.
I agree that YAML has its issues. But saying it's bad because it has too many features seems misguided. Do those advanced features get in the way of using a simple YAML file? At least not in my experience.
That being said TOML would be my choice.
> Well, this is some sort of programming language with dynamic types. But there are so many good programming languages, so I don't know why this one needs to be used.
RE: Jsonnet and others: because it has nice guarantees, like lack of arbitrary I/O and pure execution.
See: https://sre.google/workbook/configuration-specifics/#pitfall...
I like json
I kind of wish it had two and only two features: defined ordering, and comments
As to languages for configuration (specifically), I wish there was a good specification for a program config, where you would have one well-defined configuration file for defaults, and a user-specified configuration file for the values you have set/overriden.
say default.config:
{"player_name":"player", "mouse_speed":5}
{"player_name":"me"}
Middle Aged Man Language - too many braces.
Very interesting (and opinionated) overview of the existing configuration languages.
At the very bottom, author is presenting its own language (maml.dev). It is yet another JSON with comments, multiline strings, and optional commas. It's the most boring part of the page.
Here will be a list of ... things I don't like about them.
Just some opinions with no serious arguments. Okay XML is in the past but so what? There are still use cases for it. And Pkl/CUE/Dhall/Starlark looking like full-blown programming languages is a feature, but being deliberately weaker than say TypeScript is also a feature (no arbitrary I/O, in some cases no Turing completeness). I don’t think the author understands or appreciates why.
I think this proposed format is terrible. Almost like JSON, but not quite, so both humans and LLMs will be confused by it, and forget the rules.
To be honest, all I see is https://xkcd.com/927/
All config formats are bad. You either don't need all the features at all, except key:value. Or you quickly run into weird limitations and quirks.
What I rather like instead, are custom build english-like DSL's, like:
- https://man.openbsd.org/pf.conf - https://man.openbsd.org/smtpd.conf - https://man.openbsd.org/httpd.conf - … and many more
Shallow. Especially “ The era of XML is in the past… now it's dead.”
That’s not an argument against the merits of XML, it’s just a fashion declaration.
It’s also wrong. Podcasting boils down to XML files. It even heavily uses XML’s extension mechanism. XML is the basis for RSS and Atom. XML is the basis for LibreOffice and modern Microsoft Office files. XML is at the core of the epub digital book standard. And on and on.
XML may not be ideal for config (reasonable people can disagree on the topic) but it’s not dead.
It’s also interesting that he declares JSON “won” then adds a bunch of XML features to it like ordered entries and not having to quote element/attribute names.
JSON “won” for web apis - e.g. browser-server data interchange. It is not, and was never claimed to be, good for serial documents like config, or for when you need an extensible format (the “X” in XML). It’s fine for what it is, and so is XML, which, when it “won”, was similarly overused, like for web apis.
name-of-config-language
meh.
The author seems to be using "markup language" as a concept basically synonymous with a configuration language, or something that is not a programming language. A markup language is a language used to "mark up" text with formatting and structure. This may sound like a terminology nitpick, but I would argue the reason why for example XML is not a great configuration language is that it was designed to be something else – a markup language.