[waffletower]

This is a great takeaway from the article-- "programming languages are the better authoring model for cloud infrastructure". I was surprised by the simplicity of the "complex" terraform example the author offered, I have seen much thornier Terraform. The title, while appropriate for an article inspired by Terraform, I think misses the benefits DSLs have paricularly in LISP-derived ecosystems. A much better title for the article would definitely be "Terraform(ing) is a Waste of Time"

[OhMeadhbh]

Well... it's part of the cycle. First you create a declarative language to describe WHAT you want the infrastructure planner to generate. Then when your customers discover its limitations, you create a pulumi style imperative "infrastructure builder" language (or library). Then when people complain they have to do everything by hand, you create a different declarative language using whatever transfer syntax is popular that month. Then you keep repeating the cycle to ensure you have something to talk about on your blog every funding cycle.

Though... yes... I've had decent luck with DSLs in Lisp-land. It's not a panacea, and there's a couple months of training when we pick up new engineers, but for our app, it seems to work out fine.

[PaulHoule]

I like DSLs for many things but not for building out cloud infrastructure. It seems like the whole point of those things to build layer of complexity on top of layer of complexity. If any if those things meant you didn’t need to know all the thorny details of bash scripting, charsets, quoting and all, they might be a met positive but as they don’t you might as well write some bash scripts.