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Comment by RNCTX | Hacker News Reader

I don't see anyone else mentioning that the selling point of using YAML in Ansible is "human readable."

I see no practical benefit to requiring devops people to use one scripting language over another, when there are so many equivalent choices to accomplish the same tasks.

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This isn’t a simple binary flag - there’s an inflection point for most projects where YAML starts easier to read for simple tasks but you end up having to do things with loops, value manipulation, etc. which would be much easier to read in normal Python.

Well, that presumes the person is a regular user of Python. Maybe they write bash scripts instead. Maybe they're using a BSD and write bourne shell scripts and hate bash. Maybe they're Windows servers using powershell.

As someone else stated the beauty of Ansible is that it abstracts away the most common functions so that the scripts are portable, and the person maintaining the scripts doesn't have to keep up with every syntax change in version if they keep Ansible updated.

Unless you're going to convince individual open source project maintainers to agree to and convert to a somewhat rigid style guide for command line flags, API syntax, and configuration syntax (which no one has managed to do, hence the existence of distros, containers, and Ansible), you're gonna have a hard time convincing anyone to give up on markup languages in deployment tools, I think.

My point was that language complexity needs to be there once you get over a certain level of project complexity, which many projects hit. Once you need to do more than the most basic operations you’re learning something which is going to be better off learning a regular programming language which can take you much further rather than learning at least two separate syntaxes (Python and Jinja2) plus all of YAML’s quirks and duplicate syntax structure, and almost all programming tools have better IDE support, linting, and validation tools.

If you want a document language, TOML is a better choice (or JSON or even non-enterprise XML). If you want to write programs, anything else is a better choice. Hashicorp’s HCL is interesting in that it’s much better designed and supported but even there the main thing which makes it work is the presence of an escape hatch when you hit a limitation.

YAML may be human readable, that doesn't make DSL built on top of YAML by people who know shit about building DSLs less pain. You don't really write YAML, on the higher level, you interact with Ansible via interface, that on the lowest level uses YAML.

> I see no practical benefit to requiring devops people to use one scripting language over another, when there are so many equivalent choices to accomplish the same tasks.

I actually agree. I am a python programmer, for me, python makes perfect sense. Blogpost doesn't say that you should use python, just that I find pyinfra nice.

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