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by ithkuil 3316 days ago
BCL is infamous inside google for being a very powerful footgun; jsonnet is a nice reboot of the idea, with a much saner semantics
2 comments

I thought I was done with BCl/GCL when I left Google. But I guess there is no escape from it. BCL has really weird late binding behavior, very little tooling support.

Can I use ksonnet without knowing what the generated YAML looks like? If I still have to fully understand the underlying YAML formats, then using ksonnet just increases the cognitive load.

I think a parallel is say you decide to use TypeScript since it is all the rage;. But when you try to learn it, most docs says if you do this in TypeScript, this really happens in JS. Now, you need to know both TS & JS to do your job. This is why I personally never found coffeescript etc simpler JS exciting.

The idea is that we can support both simultaneously: - people who want/need full expressiveness can do that, and - people who don't need that can happily use higher-level templates that someone else has put together.

Previous efforts at "simplifying" k8s make you choose between one or the other use-case. ksonnet is trying to provide something that can be more continuous along this spectrum. .. At least that's the hope.

For a while, BCL/GCL scoping rules were what my nightmares were made of.
Jsonnet simplifies scoping over bcl quite a bit. Specifically there is no up operator.