Hi Ludo, >> For better illustration, I'll try to rewrite my own manifests in the >> way I'd like to be able to write them. That's probably more useful >> than theory (a tough statement to make for a theoretician ;-) > > Agreed!
Just to be clear: I actually intend to implement some infrastructure to make this happen, so this will take a while. One of my convictions after decades in computational science is that ideas without implementations should not be discussed extensively, so I try to live by my own standards ;-) > That’s not true. In some cases, people write something that’s actually > code (in YAML, in JSON, etc.) and there’s an interpreter running it. I have been fortunate enough not to have seen such things yet! > IOW, I think you can have a declarative _style_ in a full-blown > language, like: Definitely, and that's what I am aiming for. There remains the security issue of malevolent power users sneaking in innocuous-looking non-declarative code that non-expert users might run without suspicion. But I'd say we can make a lot of progress by having declarative style for all routine configuration data. > This is just to say that we should not conflate the style and the > language. I think what we care about is supporting a declarative style, > and making it expressive enough that people don’t feel the need to > resort to complicated code. Exactly! Cheers, Konrad.