[HN Gopher] Adding algebraic data types to Nickel
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       Adding algebraic data types to Nickel
        
       Author : JNRowe
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2024-09-06 06:19 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.tweag.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.tweag.io)
        
       | pxeger1 wrote:
       | How could you name a language after an element and then not use
       | its chemical symbol as the file extension?? (Yes I know NCL means
       | "Nickel configuration language" and can be pronounced like
       | Nickel, but come on)
        
         | jinwoo68 wrote:
         | Seems to be in the same tradition as GNU being "GNU is Not
         | Unix".
        
         | Xophmeister wrote:
         | There's an issue for this :)
         | 
         | https://github.com/tweag/nickel/issues/357
        
       | from-nibly wrote:
       | I am very excited to watch this new space unfold. Its a huge hole
       | in platform engineering. We need a lot of config but there often
       | arent robust enough config languages so people end up resorting
       | to using Turing complete languages and thats just lighting a fuse
       | for your future self.
       | 
       | Im really excited about cuelang what is everyone else keeping an
       | eye on?
        
         | mananaysiempre wrote:
         | Dhall[1] also usually gets mentioned in the same sentence as
         | CUE.
         | 
         | As for Nickel, I have mixed feelings about it of the same kind
         | as about ES6 classes and perhaps modules--we're taking a simple
         | language (an extremely simple one, in the case of Nix) and
         | baking into it some stuff that the original had as a completely
         | satisfactory library, in the name of discoverability resp.
         | uniformity. Seems a bit sad and unnecessary to be honest. (The
         | problem of Nixpkgs and NixOS, IMO, is not Nix the language,
         | which is fine for the most part, but the fact that they're a
         | single giant monorepo with comparatively very little
         | documentation even for the parts that basically serve as the
         | Nix standard library.) Looks like my design sensibilities just
         | align much better with PhD-student Eelco than with Tweag-
         | engineer Eelco.
         | 
         | [1] https://dhall-lang.org/
        
           | kevindamm wrote:
           | Dhall does seem to have more integrations but I really like
           | the amount of thought that has gone into Cue's types and
           | operational semantics.
        
             | mananaysiempre wrote:
             | I agree. If only they wrote down the
             | typechecking/evaluation semantics, even if it's in the
             | traditional form of a page's worth of cryptic deduction
             | rules.
        
           | Smaug123 wrote:
           | Is there a particular feature in Nickel you object to? When I
           | think of Nickel I imagine the merging of contracts (and not
           | much else really - that seems like its big flagship feature
           | to me), which seems to me like a pretty minimal necessary
           | feature to model Nixpkgs idioms; is that one of the features
           | you don't like?
        
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