emrichen

Serendipity strikes as I'm implementing an emrichen interpreter in golang after getting too annoyed about templating YAML as a string. The reasons I like yaml is that I can see the tree structure directly, and to my lisp brain it is extremely easy to read. Furthermore, in our age of LLMs, I find LLMs to be able to generate "correct" YAML more easily than JSON, since the tree depth is encoded in every line, and doesn't require matching larger structures. It also uses an actually significant amount less tokens. I find it extremely easy to have LLMs generate decent DSLs by asking them to use a YAML output format, and found it very robust to generate code out of these (or generate an interpreter for the newly created DSL). I didn't know about !tags until sunday, which is quite shameful, but I find that the emrichen solution is actually quite

I don't really think YAML is the problem, it's the string-based templating. I'd like to see Emrichen or something like it become more common. And Emrichen is format-agnostic, you can write your stuff in json or YAML and it looks and works pretty similarly. (Although I stick to yaml.) https://github.com/con2/emrichen If JSON had comments I might lean toward json.

Templating yaml with a text templating language like Helm's templating language is a terrible idea. Templating objects and serializing them to Yaml (with input also being Yaml) I find quite nice: https://github.com/con2/emrichen

It isn’t clear whether they already use Racket. If Racket was added for this purpose then here are a couple boring[0] solutions that could have lower operational costs. Generate OpenAPI specifications from your service code. Use a YAML preprocessor/template engine such as [1]. I have used a similar technique to generate SQL queries. [0] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology [1] https://github.com/con2/emrichen

I'd rephrase the question: "Why are we templating YAML with text-based templating tools?" I and @akx wrote a templating tool called Emrichen that's specifically designed for producing YAML and JSON from YAML templates: https://github.com/con2/emrichen In contrast to other template systems, Emrichen templates are not just "based on YAML", they _are_ YAML. YAML tags like "!Var varname" are used to perform things like variable substitution, loops etc. Variables can be of any JSON type, not just strings, and the template is evaluated top–down.