Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hubert123 3381 days ago
Apparently these people think it makes it "simpler". Well I'm sorry but me looking up how to format things with yaml and no autoformat and no intellisense just isnt good and doesnt make things simple. Even xml with a backing xsd would be better than that, but that's apparently not cool enough anymore.
2 comments
dkarapetyan 3381 days ago
I forgot about the lack of auto-complete and the horrible error messages. At least with a library when I have a syntax error or something blows up I have a debugger and the actual language at my disposal to figure stuff out. No such things are remotely available with all these external DSLs. If even there is any semblance of error reporting.

Several human centuries of effort have been spent on improving these things (syntax highlighting, auto-complete, stack traces, error messages, interactive debuggers, etc.) and then all these DSL authors decide to just chuck it all out. Boggles the mind.

More than a few times Terraform has wrapped an error message from AWS in the hopes of being helpful while hiding all the details of the actual error message and no hints how to rectify things in the DSL.

link
apatap 3381 days ago
Syntax highlighting and auto complete is available for HCL (The language used by Terraform)

e.g.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7808-hcl-language-suppo...

https://github.com/wholroyd/vscode-hcl

link
bmurphy1976 3381 days ago
Which is great and all but like the op said our files are actually jinja2 templates because HCL just doesn't cut it.
link
hubert123 3380 days ago
I had the same experience with ansible. It also wraps the responses in some ultra verbose json. I really just want to see the remote commands being executed, if you return them wrapped in some kind of format then you need to provide a gui for it. Otherwise it's all worse than before.
link
tannhaeuser 3381 days ago
Would you know a recent tool based on XML + XSD (or RNG) in the space (I believe IBM had one like 10 years ago, but it got sacked because XML)? I've never been a fan of using markup languages for things other than text/semistructured data, but yaml/toml/json is such a huge step backwards that I'm having trouble recommending it.
link