The Dhall Configuration Language

dhall-lang.org

17 points·mooreds··8 comments

Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32102203

Has functions, static types, a tree sitter grammar, an lsp client, and lots of implementations. Seems to me to be the most mature of the many new programmable configuration languages.

Excellent work. And it seems maintained. Documentation is somewhat behind the implementation, but not too much. Looks like its going to the right direction... reminding that adding features are easier than removing them.

Wonder ;) how hard it would be to bootstrap the language?..

> how hard it would be to bootstrap the language?..

I would think this is impossible, since this language is designed to be non-turing complete and forbids arbitrary side effects. You would always need a container language to make anything happen

The C language also requires some assembly, or rather machine code, if you're starting strictly from scratch.

Ok, not bootstrap in a sense of creating a sublanguage which allows to write the rest. I'm curious about how to write Dhall in C. Dhall doesn't look like a large language, right?

It's unfortunate this modern format follows the bad old design of limiting names to the inexpressive ASCII

I'll take inexpressive ASCII over a character set that's too big and not universal, I don't want characters that are not obvious to type as they hurt reading, searching and understanding.

At this point programming should be done in English only, as everyone gains so much more than what they lose.

So take it, it's not like anyone is forcing you to be expressive or care about other languages

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