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by anon291 621 days ago
Ooof... Pulumi et al are terrible to write and read. Why should I care about writing 'new' in front of all my declarative configuration? What happens when an if statement depends on a concrete value? How would that even work? The leakiness of the abstraction is too terrible to even consider.

Terraform et al, despite not being my favorite, have much simpler semantics than Pulumi. It's not always a good idea to write DSLs into languages with huge paradigm mismatches.
1 comments
jen20 620 days ago
Terraform and Pulumi have basically the same semantics.

> Why should I care about writing 'new' in front of all my declarative configuration?

Because that’s how your choice of language instantiates an object. Try F# or Swift or Go if it’s that annoying to you.

> What happens when an if statement depends on a concrete value?

What do you think “count = var.concrete_value ? 1 : 0” is doing in Terraform, exactly?

> The leakiness of the abstraction is too terrible to even consider.

While you are are entitled to your opinion, I’d suggest you are very much mistaken, and would implore you to actually consider it for a minute.

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anon291 619 days ago
Just as a point of order. You offer no case for Pulumi and your one actual discussion of the semantics is misplaced as it deals with if expressions, not statements. Stratified ifs that occur at the non-recursive areas of the language are usually not a problem for these change management systems.
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jen20 616 days ago
I'm not offering a case for or against either, to be clear - and neither are you - indeed you went so far as to say effectively you wouldn't even bother considering the semantics since they _must_ be awful.
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anon291 614 days ago
The semantics of the Pulumi runtime are probably fine, but the semantics of the DSL layer that preceeds that when mixed with the sensible semantics of the Pulumi runtime are a recipe for disaster. This is based on my extensive experience with declarative DSLs in imperative languages. The impedance mismatch is high. Nothing to do with Pulumi's internal state management, but it's beholden to javascript.
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