Hay is the declarative part of Oil: https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/hay.html

• Survey of Config Languages
• Older notes: Config Dialect
• Good lobste.rs discussion on the Hay doc

More Slogans

• YAML Is a Really Bad Syntax for a Shell Script

Comments That Add Color

• Syntax for Oil Blocks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24945449
• Syntax for Oil Blocks: https://lobste.rs/s/6oxpe3/s_lot_yaml#c_mje209
• On the "turing complete" issue: https://lobste.rs/s/gcfdnn/why_dhall_advertises_absence_turing
• Thread on Tcl: https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/202008-oil-documentation/topic/Data.20Definition.20and.20Code.20Generation.20in.20Tcl (requires login)

TODO: Dig up the Big shell-YAML anti-pattern Zulip thread.

Alternatives / Comparisons

TODO: Survey of Config Languages

• Data: YAML, Toml, JSON, etc.
• Macro languages: Go templates, m4, etc.
• Structured Languages: HCL, Cue, Jsonnet, Dhall, etc.
• Internal DSLs: Ruby in Chef/Vagrant, Python in Ansible/Puppet, etc.

Links

• https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2019/02/07/why-are-we-templating-yaml
• http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-complexity-clock.html