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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Please consider that you're a principal engineer with a BS and a Master's. And you've achieved all those things quite quickly! You're on the far end of a bell curve.

A full programming language is the natural choice for people who are full programmers. But for people who aren't, they're intimidating and add a lot of complexity. Templating systems are much more approachable for people who have a lot of experience configuring things via big blobs of text.

As a programmer, I would personally rather express everything in a programming language, so I get your perspective here. But it isn't an accident that there are so many ops-focused systems that are different takes on just automating the things people were previously doing manually.

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I totally understand that, but why not aiming high? Why we just say "you have experience configuring stuff, so we will just give you some extended json with templating, you won't be able to code....". I think this is bad approach (: We should always aim high and mentor those less experience to use programming languages for this. They don't need to know complex algorithms, distributed systems and performance optimization. It's really just more smart templating that is actually can be easier to use! (:

> Templating systems are much more approachable for people who have a lot of experience configuring things via big blobs of text.

I have mixed feelings about this statement. How reading or using jsonnet is easier? I am a principal engineer and I am struggling to work with this, how less expierience people can deal with that efficiently? (:

They can deal with it more efficiently because its model is closer to their current mental model, and so requires less cognitive load to achieve initial results.

Gabriel talks about this under the label "worse is better". [1] I agree your preferred approach is better in the long term and at scale. But that only matters in the long term, and only if scale is eventually achieved. Tool adoption is generally a series of short-term decisions, and most projects start small.

I agree mentoring people is great, but neither you nor I have time to mentor all the people just configuring things into becoming good programmers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Interesting view, thanks. (:

Secretaries at Multics sites not only used Emacs in the 70s -- they customized it with Lisp. They were only ever told they were customizing their editor, not programming it, so they never got intimidated!

Haha, that's actually amazing fact, lol.

Let's create a CONFIGURATOR language (and secretly hide Go underneath)!

Go is pretty dumbed down as languages go.

I take it as.. yes? That it would do good for configuration as it is simple? (:

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