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Comment by hosh | Hacker News Reader

While we're speculating:

I disagree that YAML is so bad. I don't particularly like HCL. The tooling I use don't care though -- as long as I can stil specify things in JSON, then I can generate (not template) what I need. It would be more difficult to generate HCL.

I'm not a fan of Helm, but it is the de facto package manager. The main reason I don't like Helm has more to do with its templating system. Templated YAML is very limiting, when compared to using a full-fledged language platform to generate a datastructure that can be converted to JSON. There are some interesting things you can do with that. (cdk8s is like this, but it is not a good example of what you can do with a generator).

On the other hand, if HCL allows us to use modules, scoping, and composition, then maybe it is not so bad after all.

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> cdk8s is like this, but it is not a good example of what you can do with a generator

As a die-hard fan of cdk8s (and the AWS CDK), I am curious to hear about this more. What do you feel is missing or could be done better?

I used Typescript cdk8s, or tried to. Manipulating the objects were unwieldy.

I wrote https://github.com/matsuri-rb/matsuri ... I have not really promoted it. I tried cdk8s because the team I was working with used Typescript and not Ruby, and I thought cdk8s would have worked well, since it generates manifests instead of templates it.

Matsuri takes advantage of language features in Ruby not found in Typescript (and probably not Python) that allows for being able to compose things together. Instead of trying to model objects, it is based around constructing a hash that is then converted to JSON. It uses fine-grained method overloading to allow for (1) mixins, and (2) configuration from default values. The result is that with very little ceremony, I can get something to construct the manifest I needed. There were a lot of extra ceremony and boiler plate needed to do anything in the Typescript cdk8s.

While I can use class inheritance with Matsuri, over the years, I had moved away from it because it was not as robust as mixins (compositions). It was quite the shock to try to work with Typescript cdk8s and the limitations of that approach.

The main reason I had not promoted Matsuri is because this tool is really made for people who know Ruby well ... but that might have been a career mistake not to try. Instead of having 10 years to slowly get enough support behind it, people want something better supported such as cdk8s or Helmfiles.

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