alt Hacker NewsNo 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...
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Thanks for this - it expresses something I've felt for a while. Solve too hard and you end up back at midnight.
One kinda-exception I'd like to raise: Cases where you'd like to use the regular proper programming language from the very beginning, but there are trust issues, and there's no good/reliable sandboxing option.
For example, B2B stuff where every customer has their own idiosyncratic sets of rules for if-this-then-that, which change at a different cadence than your releases.
In those cases, it's less that configuration slowly becomes too complex and evolves into code, and more that code is wanted from the get-go but configuration is the compromise.