Hacker News Reader

For the reasons you mention (mainly the first one), it can sometimes be useful to use a separate programming language with functions that are used to create the required format, without needing the configuration format itself to do these things.

View on HN

Can you do an infinite loop in that separate language? Throw an exception? Write to disk? Start processes? Access the Internet?

If not, you can use this language safely inside the config.

If yes, you could as well use the main language of your application, and not introduce an extra dependency.

There is, of course, always a temptation to take awk, or PowerShell, or Ruby, "because it's already installed on the system", which may not be the case on all platforms.

I did not mean that you have to introduce an extra dependency; the programming language used to make such a configuration can be the main language of the application. Although whoever needs to configure it can be someone other than whoever wrote it, and they can use whatever they want to use. The output can then be used as the configuration even on a different computer if it is not necessary to change the configuration but only use it on multiple computers. This will be appropriate for some uses but for other uses it will not be appropriate. Note also that different programs will have different requirements for what kind of configurations you will require.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com