• 17 Posts
  • 290 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • Everything I implement at work is open source because I don’t want to wait for a purchase approval.

    Just to say, though, I feel like 99% of the software we deploy is open-source for that exact reason. Projects generally start out small, where you try to evaluate some concept. You’re not gonna spend months to go through the purchase process of some proprietary tool, if you can help it…






  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlTOML
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    23 days ago

    I can understand the sentiment and would 100% agree for programming languages.
    But personally I actually like that it encourages a flat structure, because you do not want to be yakshaving the structure of your config file. Too much nesting means you will sooner or later run into configuration keys being nested under the wrong category, because your project context changed over time.

    And well, as I’ve argued in a few other comments already, I think non-techie users have a disproportionally simpler time when no nesting is used. They understand the concept of a heading and then just adding a line underneath the appropriate heading is really intuitive.
    You can just tell them to add the line certificate="/tmp/cert.crt" under [network.tls] and they will find a line in their config file which actually reads [network.tls] and they can just paste that line as-is.

    With nesting, they’d need to add it under here:

    network: {
        tls: {
            certificate: "/tmp/cert.crt"
        }
    }
    

    Which means:

    • You need some awkward explanation where they should nest it, or an explanation that e.g. “network.tls” translates to nesting.
    • They will ask whether they should indent the line you sent them.
    • Well, and it’s also surprisingly difficult to explain between which braces they should put the text, and that’s at the end of the braces, but not after the braces etc., if you’re talking to them on a call.

    It’s not even that I’m completely enamored with TOML, but this aspect is certainly growing on me…


  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlTOML
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    24 days ago

    VSCode is Electron, i.e. a webpage, so it’s not hugely surprising that they opted for the natively supported JavaScript Object Notation. And also shows that they don’t care for using the right tool for the job to begin with.

    Personally, I much prefer TOML over YAML, because it does not have significant whitespace, and because you can read the spec in a reasonable amount of time. It just has so much less complexity, while still covering the vast majority of use-cases perfectly well.


  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlTOML
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    24 days ago

    We just document that this is how you write the config file:

    [network]
    bind.host = "127.0.0.1"
    bind.port = 1234
    
    # etc.
    

    And that seems straightforward enough. Yeah, technically users can opt to use inline tables or raw strings or whatever, but they don’t have to.


  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlTOML
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    25 days ago

    Well, you can still decide how much of the TOML features you actually use in your specific application. For example, I’m currently involved in two projects at $DAYJOB where we read TOML configurations and we don’t make use of the inline tables that OP memes about in either of them.

    Ultimately, the big advantage of TOML over INI is that it standardizes all kinds of small INI extensions that folks have come up with over the decades. As such, it has a formal specification and in particular only one specification.
    You can assume that you can read the same TOML file from two different programming languages, which you cannot just assume for INI.


  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlTOML
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    25 days ago

    Counterpoints:

    • TOML is intended for configuration, not for data serialization, so you shouldn’t be sending it over the wire in all too crazy ways anyways.
    • Most protocols will have a built-in way of know when the whole content has been transferred, typically by putting a content length into the header.
    • Having to wait until the closing } or ] can also be a disadvantage of JSON, since you cannot stream it, i.e. start processing the fields/elements before the whole thing has arrived. (You probably still don’t want to use TOML for that, though. JSONL, CSV or such are a better idea.)

  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlTOML
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    25 days ago

    Well, TOML is essentially just an extension of the INI format (which helped its adoption quite a bit, since you could just fork INI parsers for all kinds of programming languages).

    And then, yeah, flattening everything is kind of baked into INI, where it arguably made more sense.
    Although, I do also feel like non-techies fare better with flat files, since they don’t have to understand where into the structure they have to insert the value. They just need find the right “heading” to put the line under, which is something they’re familiar with.



  • Most developers I’ve looked at would happily just paste the curl|bash thing into the terminal.

    I mean, I typically see it used for installing applications, and so long as TLS is used for the download, I’m still not aware of a good reason why you should check the Bash script in particular in that case, since the application itself could just as well be malware.

    Of course, it’s better to check the Bash script than to not check it, but at that point we should also advise to download the source code for the application, review it and then compile it yourself.
    At some point, you just have to bite the bullet and I have not yet seen a good argument why the Bash script deserves special treatment here…

    Having said that, for cases where you’re not installing an application, yeah, reviewing the script allows you to use it, without having to trust the source to the same degree as you do for installing an application.






  • Huh, so if you don’t opt for these more specific number types, then your program will explode sooner or later, depending on the architecture it’s being run on…?

    I guess, times were different back when C got created, with register size still much more in flux. But yeah, from today’s perspective, that seems terrifying. 😅


  • What really frustrates me about that, is that someone put in a lot of effort to be able to write these things out using proper words, but it still isn’t really more readable.

    Like, sure, unsigned is very obvious. But short, int, long and long long don’t really tell you anything except “this can fit more or less data”. That same concept can be expressed with a growing number, i.e. i16, i32 and i64.

    And when someone actually needs to know how much data fits into each type, well, then the latter approach is just better, because it tells you right on the tin.