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Comment by bbkane | Hacker News Reader

What would you recommend instead? Personally, I think Typescript makes a great config language

Dedicated config languages are the best usually. Jsonnet/Cue/friends.

Failing that if you actually need/want a procedural/non-pure language then I think Kotlin or Ruby take the cake. Both have extremely strong support for DSLs which IMO is key to reaching a modicum of usability.

Starlark is nice as well, it’s syntactically based on Python, and behaves a lot like regular procedural languages, but it’s meant to provide a pure and safe environment for configuration and be embeddable.

Big +1. We switched to Starlark for our DSL last year and have been very pleased. Users who've never used Starlark before come in with some 'what, another language?' trepidation, and end up pleasantly surprised.

Since using Bazel a bit I have grown an appreciation for Starlark also. The big thing is that list and dict comprehensions are a really nice fit for these types of tasks.

Lua is fantastic for the config-as-code use case. Easy to read and write, with a lightweight embeddable interpreter, and it has almost universal library support across different languages/environments.

It's a shame that helm v3 didn't move forward with the lua engine[0]. I don't imagine ~=/1-based arrays were a worse timeline... And here we are 5 years later.

[0] https://github.com/helm/helm/issues/5084

I dunno - using cdk8s at one place was a miserable experience. Adding runtime evaluation just made everything more complex than it should be.

In that case I preferred to describe infrastructure rather than program it.

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