Probably because they want people to freely maintain it. I hate corporations abusing open source, but putting a big price to the end user. Open source it's great when end users benefit from it. If open source is hidden under 20 meters of proprietary garbage, why is it any different then unpaid labor?
@@ck-dl4to NTFS had streams and that failed because people hate Metadata inside the file Metadata goes in the file system, the name is Metadata, extension and file type also is
13:17 "Imagine if your JSON autocompleted and gave you errors when you were editing it" You don't even have to imagine, it's already a thing with JSON Schema.
Within the first 3 mins of this video, I was already screaming JSON Schema. It follows DRY principles, has validation, is standardized, can be transpiled to POCO code in various languages. And JSON Schema files can also be referenced in an OpenAPI/Swagger spec to generate code for entire API endpoints. But sure, Apple, do your own thing. Just like they are trying to build the next standard of podcasting when we already have a well-developed Podcasting 2.0 standard.
I found it funny because usually if I wanted to pickle something, there was a better solution assuming I wanted my project to be scalable in some way. And to be fair, you're going to choose one or the other, and as far as I know there's no external programs that open pickle files directly so you'll just be opening Apple's .pkl with a text editor and not touching pickles directly anyways.
I work at apple, i joined when it wasn’t open source and i was very skeptical about PCL ( internal it’s called PCL instead of PKL) but it does solve a lot of problems and the IDE integration is great. It has completely replaced helm in our team, it’s much better. I hope eventually helm charts will also be published in PKL.
Sooo... They didn't know Nix, Nickel, Dhall, CUE, Jsonnet or HCL existed and therefore had to create their own thing? :/ It doesn't even look that good tbh. But yeah, impressive that Apple open sources something. That doesn't happen very often.
@@jhuglen The EU just said you need user consent before you store data on their PC for reasons other than purely functional. The Industry could have just followed the Do Not Track setting, but they want your data. Not the EU's fault that sites are evil.
Regex makes this all the more cursed. Now you can have a string format language inside of a data format language which can now be directly processed inside of your application's language, which means you have a language in a language in a language. I am absolutely digging this! 😂
Strictly speaking, RegEx is not a language, it is a pattern matching syntax. What would a better alternative have been? Invent yet another string pattern matching syntax for Pkl?
honestly this seems REALLY cool - from the title I thought it was just another way of storing data that's nicer to use than json like hjson or yaml, but no this seems like WAY more!! really cool stuff :D
@@jhuglen You really need to take a nap or some shit man. It's either extreme sleep deprivation, an absurd amount of alcohol, or you're doped the fuck up on psychedelics. Either way, you need a break
Really i prefer to validate my jsonf config file in my code, i dont like this and i agree with you, whats with this trend of overcomplicating things....omg, for example in c# i could use a library like fluenvalidation an validate rules for my json's structure with rules like "port" is an int for example .... not needing to define a new language for that 🤣🤣
this, just writing the parser for this was probably some intern's whole summer and it only made the problem worse. JSON is from 2001 and it's not impressive to be slightly better than one part of it 20 years later.
@@duartecunhaleao but consider that what is 'valid' may change from consumer or other factors and I doubt you are going to skip server/app side validations anyways and just leave it to this config, so you will end up doubling the validations. Also validation should be close to the app code im reading/writing as it is crucial.
As a Typescript developer i don't see much value in this, because a pkl file have roughly the same lines of code of a regular js/ts file used for configuration, but using js/ts doesn't need to install additional binaries or dependencies. However i can see some potential for more complex languages like Go/Rust/Java/etc. that are not suited for small "scripts" since they take in account stuff that you don't care when creating a configuration file such as pointers, packages, namespaces, classes, the borrow checker, constructors, errors handling.
> but using js/ts doesn't need to install additional binaries or dependencies Huh? What world are you living in where JS and TS doesn't require binaries or dependencies?
@@recepciftci2642 What computer? No computer comes with NodeJS preinstalled. You may have Docker images, but then it makes his initial point moot. Plus you'd still need to add TSC compiler as a dependency. That is besides the point, it's comparing apples to oranges.
@@dealloc I will help you understand the comment. The comment did not mean that JS and TS doesnt require binaries / dependencies to be installed, the commentor was talking about simply using JS/TS files as a configuration file, thus not having to install any other binaries related to configuration management tools. Sometimes its okay to assume things and not take everything literal, especially in a world in which english is a secondary or tertiary language for many people. Perfect grammar is something alot of us wish we'd have. Sometimes we slip up, and the meaning of a sentence might differ from what we actually had in mind when we wrote it.
@@MrBa143 Then it makes even less sense, because the topic was about Pkl which, as with other similar languages like CUE, solves an entirely different problem compared to declaring a few variables in a JS file. No one said that Pkl was made replace your app-specific variables. They exist to solve consistency and type-safe configuration across multiple domains. Which, as we have seen with services like Cloudflare and Amazon, where misconfigurations can have detrimental outcomes, has a problem space.
chatter getting worked up about "version conflicts in config files": that's literally just a thing. The config format (or parts of it) may change over time after all, and it's important to keep track of that. It's great if Pkl can encode these existing problems and provide editor support for solving them... tho I wonder what form that'll take in practice, if and how different versions of a config format might be supported at the same time.
When I saw a configuration language that is "a blend between a static language and a general-purpose programming language" I immediately thought of Nix, a language with similar ideas created for a similar purpose. Nix doesn't seem to do very well outside Nix and NixOS ecosystems though, and Pkl does seem easier to grasp.
Totally agreed - for my NixOS system that I have been using for almost 4 years now I am happy with the subset of the Nix language that I need to know, but even then it sometimes still is hard for me to understand the syntax. And for programmer that is not used to it I think it is harder to fight with some of the constraints that you will run into when using nix in a very dynamic ecosystem: in the company I work for we are using it e.g. for building some JavaScript stuff and just the amount of work it takes for _some_ of the dependencies to be packaged is just insane (but to be honest, so is what those dependencies are doing on installation...). So yes - I really love NixOS, but I personally am sometimes struggling a bit with the nix language (yes - because I don't use it (or something similar) that often)
@@jhuglen hey can you stop spamming replies with this nonsense… You are conflating two completely different things… Apple is forced by the eu to conform to certain standards that the eu has set, like using USB-C ports, but that doesn’t mean that the eu has “forced” them to make a config language they developed open source… Like.. I really don’t know what you mean by “eu forced them” or “only in eu” here
Cool idea, but I'm having a hard time understanding the actual use case. I have never found myself needing a language agnostic config, Both JSON and YAML have schema files which solves auto complete.
I would rather them put thos energy into fixing the crashing bug in Xcode. Or maybe decoupling that IDE and compiler from MacOS versions so you can work on old apps without having to switch to old Macs with old MacOS versions.
>old (anyhting) >Apple There is no backwards compatibility. There is no tolerance. You will work with the newest version, whether or not it makes sense.
Dude this isn't as big of a problem in JS land. For JSON, we have schemas. For JavaScript and TypeScript, most packages come with a defineConfig out of the box, and if they don't, rest assured somebody has already published an NPM package for that purpose.
This is so awesome ! Currently I'm using json config file to validate and get autocomplete on my json files. And I do not have the best experience with it. Pkl could be a game changer !
All the Python folks are hissing about this (don’t blame ‘em, they’ve been using “pickle” for serialization for ages). Anyway - I wonder if at Apple, all their Kubernetes cluster manifests are written in Pkl files. Hmm… that’d be interesting to look at!
When i heard about pkl i was not interested thinking we already have enough tools, but the features shown here have some features. I can imagine using this to share a configuration between a frontend js and a backend rust/php/c application.
Being a big fan of comptime in Zig, this will work beautifully. Types in more complex use cases are in desperate need of logic that can be resolved during the compilation of a particular program.
So C macros for config files? something like Cmake? This is just another syntax to add to the collection I have to use once every few weeks. Between all these scripting languages, config formats, CLIs, programming languages, etc we are expected to know is nearing 100+.
you can actually use C macros in any languages, but nobody does it because it would confuse newbies who have no idea what a preprocessor is EDIT: also your IDE would complain about syntax errors lol
It seems they tried to recreate Terraform's HCL language, but without Terraform behind. Still I don't see it's usage overlapping wit json/yaml/toml or whatever. Let's see 3 use cases: 1. Transport format: it doesn't seem suitable (if I need schema oriented stuff and validation why not using binary formats such as thrift,avro or protobuffers?) 2. app configuration: imho I still would go for something simple and execute logic in my application instead of adding an additional step in my build process for compiling and packaging 3. Build configuration: do i really need standardization?eg If I'm in the jvm ecosystem I use gradle with groovy or kts and there is one in a billion cases where I need to transfer this configuration to another stack. Yes it takes more mental energy to learn all the tools and languages in order to be a polyglot developer but there is not so much to do unless you don't want to invent a an ecosystem agnostic deps/build management system...and good luck with that!
Wouldn’t say say Apple dislike JavaScript when they have integrated JavaScript support all over the place in their products. But yeah, Pkl looks cool! Always great to see more safety in languages. Thanks for showcasing it.
Of course a third party might do it, but it's not likely to get first-class support from Hashicorp since they defined their own config language in HCL. It *might* make Hashicorp listen to users more and address some of the issues with HCL, though.
"Pickle" sounds like "Pickel" which is German for "Pimple". Can't wait to hear my coworkers say "Create a pimple file for this project!". For that reason, I'm out 😆
They thankfully realised that the only way to have it adopted is to not only open source it but provide extensions to major editors, even VS Code. It's a good call, if they tried to make something proprietary, it would die painfully. Pkl seems cool, but it smells of something that will be infamous for quirks and hard to make parsers like YAML. Time will tell I guess, I do like it and hope it catches on and ends up being good.
7:52 - The Zip Code rule will break in the UK, were our equivalent, postcodes are a string in three sections. The first section is one or two letters, represinting the main postcode region, the next is the postcode district, which is 1 or 2 numbers, or a number followed by a letter. Then there is a space, then a number and two letters.
Honestly, I've already seen all of this before. There's a language much smaller called Nickel, same concept but it's based on FP (perfect for config) and it's already past 1.0.0.
Well, both. There's the json/yaml/whatever generators in the CLI itself. With those, you could only ever *write* PKL from now on and add a pkl step to your build process which translates your pkl config your desired format. There's also the interpreter/compiler implementation for different languages, so you could also load pkl files directly from through one of the supported languages (Go, Java, Kotlin, Swift) without the intermediate step to json/yaml/...
So from my understanding, this is supposed to help checking out projects, where the default config is ommitted from the repository, but you still want a default config to be created on first run, like an ENV bootstrap ? Or what is this useful for ?
Had not heard of DHall or Nickel. Just found their websites and notice that while DHall has a VS Code plug-in, they have no support for JetBrains IDEs. So for that reason alone Pkl is more attractive to me, since I'm spend most of my days in GoLand.
I'm all in for built-in declarative validation rules, but built-in programming will make it hard to maintain readability (you don't know the result until the file is executed / compiled). Still will give it a go, though
I like how the guy from Super Troopers agrees with me that PKL is probably the path forward in terms of configuration languages. It encodes a lot of type information, so it follows that with PKL is at least capable to generating any static configuration that requires less information. On the other hand, the fact that it is limited as a programming language guarantees that it will remain focused and stay easy to read.
Don't think kotlin support is mainly about android. Kotlin is used to build ios apps and apps across the Apple eco system. Also it's just a better java and it's able to interop with java so it seems like low hanging fruit though if it's true multi platform kotlin it'll be a bit more that java -> kotlin. Happy to see Go support as a first class supported language btw!
Seems pretty nice for testing purposes too. Could define data structure in pkl and create tests that are invalid. If you also could import data restrictions from pkl into the code, that would be awesome. Like defining data structure in pkl and define constraits on the data there, and using data described in the structure in the code would then import the constraints too. Though exporting logic out of the code is not necessarily that good, but maybe could use some autocomplete function in IDE instead.
Did I miss a way to fix iterating over and parsing arrays and/or objects and mixes of the two? JavaScript's nested for loops or for ins or Lodash etc.. to get properties and values is stupid. Did I miss where Pkl fixes this? The casting of obj/array just to iterate and put in the correct order and other things? Thanks for the video nonetheless.
I've made a bunch of Python tools that all use YAML for config and despite anchors and my own hack for including files, DRY is not straightforward. I'd happily have a bunch of pkl files for my config if there was a way of getting the output into a Python dictionary.
So, they created Cascading Configuration Language; they should have named it CCL. Given how maintainable the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time CSS turned out to be, I am not so sure that we should consider them creating a cascading configuration language to be a good thing... 🤷♂️ #jmtcw
A few years ago Apple introduced a conditional and declarative configuration mobile device management model to set conditional parameters to be set on the iOS, MacOS operating systems. This seems like the underlying programming framework is pKL.
I've been using Dhall for the last 5 or 6 years, I honestly think the only reason it hasn't caught on is it came from a functional programming background.
I tried something tangentially similar to this - I had a half hearted attempt years ago at SQL -> yaml for minecraft server (modded) The idea was I would normalize all configuration into a database, and then through a FUSE filesystem mounted over your config folder, it would magically generate confs to read and accept changes written to it. I never finished it but it seemed like a cool idea.
JetBrains editors already have a decent understanding of common config files. package.json for example has the autocomplete that's shown here (it will even do lookups for dependency versions). next.config.js has this too. But I understand the value of codifying this into something common.
ngl the most interesting part to me is standardizing the way runtime json gets generated 😮 it’s an easy task but cool not to have to decipher whatever madness someone cooks up to do it
Why would you create a new language with regex support and use strings for regex that need to be escaped? They could use the perl/js regex syntax of a statement surrounded by 2 slashes.
This looks very much like the next log4j vulnerability waiting to happen. I'm always surprised how simple things like logging or configuring can become so overengineered. Also validating configuration options in the config rather than at it's use site strikes me as similar to validating user-submitted data only on the browser side and not the server side... it just feels wrong.
I went over the source code of Pkl and although it support non-string keys in mappings (i.e. more like msgpack than JSON), it looks like very much it only support a subset of YAML 1.1. Since the YAML 1.2 has been out since 2009, that might have to do with the state of YAML parsers/dumpers in the Java/Kotlin, world and not necessarily a conscious choice by the developers. That unfortunately makes it only a potential replacement for a subset of YAML supporting applications, and also not a potential replacement for Python's pickle format.
Classes, functions, loops and annotations; surely they did not reinvent C# or Java?! So to prevent using, say, groovy to do this, we now need pkl. That's just replacing 💩 with new 💩. All this smells too much like XML with xml schema. But a bit better, because XML is a massive 💩🙃
They open-sourced it because they want it to be a standard
because of 'Mother Nature"
I mean yeah it would be insane to keep this kind of thing proprietary no?
@@lmao4982you'd be surprised
Probably because they want people to freely maintain it.
I hate corporations abusing open source, but putting a big price to the end user.
Open source it's great when end users benefit from it. If open source is hidden under 20 meters of proprietary garbage, why is it any different then unpaid labor?
@@jhuglen whats wrong with it
The fact that Pickle and .pkl are already the name and extension for a common existing file format is driving me insane.
No one should use a file extension as identifier.
The fact that pickle ball makes such an annoying popping sound is driving me insane.
@@ck-dl4to NTFS had streams and that failed because people hate Metadata inside the file
Metadata goes in the file system, the name is Metadata, extension and file type also is
@@monad_tcp NTFS probably had streams because MacOS had resource files.
Swift was already a programming language before Apple release theirs
13:17 "Imagine if your JSON autocompleted and gave you errors when you were editing it"
You don't even have to imagine, it's already a thing with JSON Schema.
He mustn’t have edited a package.json in a while.
Within the first 3 mins of this video, I was already screaming JSON Schema. It follows DRY principles, has validation, is standardized, can be transpiled to POCO code in various languages. And JSON Schema files can also be referenced in an OpenAPI/Swagger spec to generate code for entire API endpoints.
But sure, Apple, do your own thing. Just like they are trying to build the next standard of podcasting when we already have a well-developed Podcasting 2.0 standard.
yep and it's supported natively by vscode
Typical theo
But it doesn't have for-loopsd!!@#!@#
as a person who uses python pickle files every day i find this naming choice very annoying
Literally thought the same thing (but I’ve only used the library like once)
PYTHONISTA: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Youre supposed to name those as ".dat" files
I found it funny because usually if I wanted to pickle something, there was a better solution assuming I wanted my project to be scalable in some way.
And to be fair, you're going to choose one or the other, and as far as I know there's no external programs that open pickle files directly so you'll just be opening Apple's .pkl with a text editor and not touching pickles directly anyways.
You should probably stop using the security nightmare that is python pickle.
You can tell they want folks to use it because they also released a neovim plugin and aren't just catering to VScode users
Why does the EU live in your head rent-free?@@jhuglen
@@jhuglen Ah okay, I thought you had some weird hate-boner for the EU 😅
the neovim plugin is crap though
I used to Pickle my Python back in the day.
Mmm Pickled python.
My mom used to as well
@@vikingthedudeYour mom used to pickle his python?
I still pickle my python. pkl is a well-known file extension for this. WTF
the smartest thing a new standard can do is make it easy to incrementally migrate, and it seems they are doing that
I love that the example password they used was "hunter2" lol
What was the password? All I see is *******.
I work at apple, i joined when it wasn’t open source and i was very skeptical about PCL ( internal it’s called PCL instead of PKL) but it does solve a lot of problems and the IDE integration is great. It has completely replaced helm in our team, it’s much better. I hope eventually helm charts will also be published in PKL.
if only they wouldve still call it PCL here, as there is quite a confusion in the python community haha
Someone's writing Doom in that
the funny thing is is that you're probably correct
Sooo... They didn't know Nix, Nickel, Dhall, CUE, Jsonnet or HCL existed and therefore had to create their own thing? :/ It doesn't even look that good tbh. But yeah, impressive that Apple open sources something. That doesn't happen very often.
What browser did you use to make your comment?
@@jhuglenWhy on Earth are you constantly talking about the EU in every single comment?? What about any of this has anything to do with the EU????
@@jhuglenbro you’re drunk get off TH-cam 💀
@@jhuglen
The EU just said you need user consent before you store data on their PC for reasons other than purely functional.
The Industry could have just followed the Do Not Track setting, but they want your data. Not the EU's fault that sites are evil.
Cuelang is still rough but the real deal. I'm trying to understand it better and contribute.
I feel bad for people that have to now use this and the pickle module for file saving in python programs
I feel bad for people that have to use python.
Yeah fuck me
@@catalystcorpi feel bad for people
@@X-3KI feel bad
@@gh0stcloud499I feel
About the IDE autocompletion 13:30, you do have json-schema.
@@jhuglen Wtf are you on about
@@jhuglenthe easiest comments to delete are the comments that never get made 🙏
@@jhuglenyou need to get off the internet
It’s time consuming to write, even if tools can help it’s full of boilerplate
Regex makes this all the more cursed. Now you can have a string format language inside of a data format language which can now be directly processed inside of your application's language, which means you have a language in a language in a language. I am absolutely digging this! 😂
Strictly speaking, RegEx is not a language, it is a pattern matching syntax.
What would a better alternative have been? Invent yet another string pattern matching syntax for Pkl?
@@mortenhattesenIt was (basically) a tongue-in-cheek comment.
honestly this seems REALLY cool - from the title I thought it was just another way of storing data that's nicer to use than json like hjson or yaml, but no this seems like WAY more!! really cool stuff :D
My first thought was it sounds just more complicated to use
@@jhuglen You really need to take a nap or some shit man. It's either extreme sleep deprivation, an absurd amount of alcohol, or you're doped the fuck up on psychedelics. Either way, you need a break
That's my second and third thought as well. No, wait, the third is overengineered.
reading an article while recording yourself is soooo creative, original and value adding....
I dont want logic in my config files, jesus christ I cant find this appealing at all.
Really i prefer to validate my jsonf config file in my code, i dont like this and i agree with you, whats with this trend of overcomplicating things....omg, for example in c# i could use a library like fluenvalidation an validate rules for my json's structure with rules like "port" is an int for example .... not needing to define a new language for that 🤣🤣
this, just writing the parser for this was probably some intern's whole summer and it only made the problem worse. JSON is from 2001 and it's not impressive to be slightly better than one part of it 20 years later.
I would love not to have to write any more validation code along the main code...
@@duartecunhaleao but consider that what is 'valid' may change from consumer or other factors and I doubt you are going to skip server/app side validations anyways and just leave it to this config, so you will end up doubling the validations. Also validation should be close to the app code im reading/writing as it is crucial.
Seriously. And if you are creating long config files with a lot of repetition just write a script to generate them.
As a Typescript developer i don't see much value in this, because a pkl file have roughly the same lines of code of a regular js/ts file used for configuration, but using js/ts doesn't need to install additional binaries or dependencies.
However i can see some potential for more complex languages like Go/Rust/Java/etc. that are not suited for small "scripts" since they take in account stuff that you don't care when creating a configuration file such as pointers, packages, namespaces, classes, the borrow checker, constructors, errors handling.
> but using js/ts doesn't need to install additional binaries or dependencies
Huh? What world are you living in where JS and TS doesn't require binaries or dependencies?
@@dealloc Computer has already NodeJS installed. So you don't need to install anything extra.
@@recepciftci2642 What computer? No computer comes with NodeJS preinstalled. You may have Docker images, but then it makes his initial point moot.
Plus you'd still need to add TSC compiler as a dependency.
That is besides the point, it's comparing apples to oranges.
@@dealloc I will help you understand the comment. The comment did not mean that JS and TS doesnt require binaries / dependencies to be installed, the commentor was talking about simply using JS/TS files as a configuration file, thus not having to install any other binaries related to configuration management tools. Sometimes its okay to assume things and not take everything literal, especially in a world in which english is a secondary or tertiary language for many people. Perfect grammar is something alot of us wish we'd have. Sometimes we slip up, and the meaning of a sentence might differ from what we actually had in mind when we wrote it.
@@MrBa143 Then it makes even less sense, because the topic was about Pkl which, as with other similar languages like CUE, solves an entirely different problem compared to declaring a few variables in a JS file.
No one said that Pkl was made replace your app-specific variables. They exist to solve consistency and type-safe configuration across multiple domains. Which, as we have seen with services like Cloudflare and Amazon, where misconfigurations can have detrimental outcomes, has a problem space.
Python’s pickle library: am I a joke to you?
chatter getting worked up about "version conflicts in config files": that's literally just a thing. The config format (or parts of it) may change over time after all, and it's important to keep track of that. It's great if Pkl can encode these existing problems and provide editor support for solving them... tho I wonder what form that'll take in practice, if and how different versions of a config format might be supported at the same time.
There's a difference between changing config files and tracking configuration versions so you can load data from older formats properly.
When I saw a configuration language that is "a blend between a static language and a general-purpose programming language" I immediately thought of Nix, a language with similar ideas created for a similar purpose. Nix doesn't seem to do very well outside Nix and NixOS ecosystems though, and Pkl does seem easier to grasp.
Totally agreed - for my NixOS system that I have been using for almost 4 years now I am happy with the subset of the Nix language that I need to know, but even then it sometimes still is hard for me to understand the syntax. And for programmer that is not used to it I think it is harder to fight with some of the constraints that you will run into when using nix in a very dynamic ecosystem: in the company I work for we are using it e.g. for building some JavaScript stuff and just the amount of work it takes for _some_ of the dependencies to be packaged is just insane (but to be honest, so is what those dependencies are doing on installation...). So yes - I really love NixOS, but I personally am sometimes struggling a bit with the nix language (yes - because I don't use it (or something similar) that often)
@@miallo just learn FP .. here's a hint: you can do everything with foldl'
It's basically the SCSS/SASS of config. Slick.
@@jhuglen hey can you stop spamming replies with this nonsense…
You are conflating two completely different things… Apple is forced by the eu to conform to certain standards that the eu has set, like using USB-C ports, but that doesn’t mean that the eu has “forced” them to make a config language they developed open source…
Like.. I really don’t know what you mean by “eu forced them” or “only in eu” here
I'm guessing you are 14 @@jhuglen
@@SwatejTech I wan't to know what he said ):
Actually, it's mostly HOCON.
Cool idea, but I'm having a hard time understanding the actual use case. I have never found myself needing a language agnostic config,
Both JSON and YAML have schema files which solves auto complete.
When you work with environments which practically live on configurations and a mistake can take down a fleet of services, this is _very_ useful.
Every year you present two vscode killers and three json replacements
I would rather them put thos energy into fixing the crashing bug in Xcode. Or maybe decoupling that IDE and compiler from MacOS versions so you can work on old apps without having to switch to old Macs with old MacOS versions.
lol, apple dev will always be somewhat cursed. Its what they chose when they decided to be super proprietary.
>old (anyhting)
>Apple
There is no backwards compatibility. There is no tolerance. You will work with the newest version, whether or not it makes sense.
You do realise Apple has more than 5 engineers and not all of them can meaningfully work on xcode, right?
does Apple even use XCode internally?
Dude this isn't as big of a problem in JS land. For JSON, we have schemas. For JavaScript and TypeScript, most packages come with a defineConfig out of the box, and if they don't, rest assured somebody has already published an NPM package for that purpose.
This is the kind of content I'd subscribe for. Have seen your videos ocassionally, but valuable content like this is subsbscription worthy.
This is so awesome !
Currently I'm using json config file to validate and get autocomplete on my json files. And I do not have the best experience with it.
Pkl could be a game changer !
Yes .properties are still being used especially in default spring boot apps
Can't blame him. He lives in a frontend bubble.
you can use yaml configs which are more readable for larger configs
@shubitoxX I know I just wished my department used YAML more often 😂
Pkl feels like Typescript meets SASS
I was about to say something similar.
Very true.
All the Python folks are hissing about this (don’t blame ‘em, they’ve been using “pickle” for serialization for ages).
Anyway - I wonder if at Apple, all their Kubernetes cluster manifests are written in Pkl files. Hmm… that’d be interesting to look at!
There's another configuration language I like which is Dhall. For those who love Haskell, Rust and etc.
Unfortunately it seems only the Haskell bindings are maintained and non of the other languages.
1:26, Apple has an official Swift LSP for VSCode btw
I'm going to keep using JSON, avoid YAML, never use XML on principal and now avoid using Pkl. Sounds good!
How would you compare this to Cue? Seems like they are solving the same problems
Yes, definitely! cue seems more pure and pkl more eng oriented.
They clearly share underlying abstraction.
I was thinking the same thing
Cue looks more powerful to me. The built in scripting engine in Cue is brilliant.
@@DryBones111 Hopefully no security holes.
I am loving that theo has returned back to his roots in terms of tye content he is putting out.
Honey, I shrunk the JSON!
Don’t worry, you have a great personality ❤
Did you end up with YAML?
When i heard about pkl i was not interested thinking we already have enough tools, but the features shown here have some features. I can imagine using this to share a configuration between a frontend js and a backend rust/php/c application.
Being a big fan of comptime in Zig, this will work beautifully. Types in more complex use cases are in desperate need of logic that can be resolved during the compilation of a particular program.
I feel like that laugh at 3:49 was a genuine Theo, almost like he broke character for a second and had a real chuckle. Great content! Keep it up.
This is very very cursed, could not expect less from Apple
adding ‘logic’ to config is like building a house of cards, except where the cards are made of s**t
Awesome, finally I can write my Ansible configs in a sane way. Not the full config, but what I define in my Inventory.
So C macros for config files? something like Cmake? This is just another syntax to add to the collection I have to use once every few weeks. Between all these scripting languages, config formats, CLIs, programming languages, etc we are expected to know is nearing 100+.
you can actually use C macros in any languages, but nobody does it because it would confuse newbies who have no idea what a preprocessor is
EDIT: also your IDE would complain about syntax errors lol
Definitely not like CMake. Thankfully.
That’s really interesting, thanks for doing a video on this.
It seems they tried to recreate Terraform's HCL language, but without Terraform behind. Still I don't see it's usage overlapping wit json/yaml/toml or whatever. Let's see 3 use cases:
1. Transport format: it doesn't seem suitable (if I need schema oriented stuff and validation why not using binary formats such as thrift,avro or protobuffers?)
2. app configuration: imho I still would go for something simple and execute logic in my application instead of adding an additional step in my build process for compiling and packaging
3. Build configuration: do i really need standardization?eg If I'm in the jvm ecosystem I use gradle with groovy or kts and there is one in a billion cases where I need to transfer this configuration to another stack. Yes it takes more mental energy to learn all the tools and languages in order to be a polyglot developer but there is not so much to do unless you don't want to invent a an ecosystem agnostic deps/build management system...and good luck with that!
Wouldn’t say say Apple dislike JavaScript when they have integrated JavaScript support all over the place in their products.
But yeah, Pkl looks cool! Always great to see more safety in languages. Thanks for showcasing it.
Nickel also have constraints and documentation. And Nix is really cool in merging things and have inter-dependent pluggable modules of configurations.
I can't wait to see this for Terraform
Of course a third party might do it, but it's not likely to get first-class support from Hashicorp since they defined their own config language in HCL.
It *might* make Hashicorp listen to users more and address some of the issues with HCL, though.
I agree with your point of view！！！
Have you tried cdktf?
"Pickle" sounds like "Pickel" which is German for "Pimple". Can't wait to hear my coworkers say "Create a pimple file for this project!". For that reason, I'm out 😆
They thankfully realised that the only way to have it adopted is to not only open source it but provide extensions to major editors, even VS Code. It's a good call, if they tried to make something proprietary, it would die painfully.
Pkl seems cool, but it smells of something that will be infamous for quirks and hard to make parsers like YAML. Time will tell I guess, I do like it and hope it catches on and ends up being good.
This came out of nowhere, they basically made a very accessible and powerful modelling language with generators and all... incredible
Theo this is exactly the approach Hashicorp tried to take with HCL
7:52 - The Zip Code rule will break in the UK, were our equivalent, postcodes are a string in three sections. The first section is one or two letters, represinting the main postcode region, the next is the postcode district, which is 1 or 2 numbers, or a number followed by a letter. Then there is a space, then a number and two letters.
well, of course a rule targeting US postal codes will break when given something that is not a US postal code
Honestly, I've already seen all of this before. There's a language much smaller called Nickel, same concept but it's based on FP (perfect for config) and it's already past 1.0.0.
So it doesn't replace or "kill" anything, it just makes making those things more usable? I don't think I'm understanding it right
Clickbait
Well, both. There's the json/yaml/whatever generators in the CLI itself. With those, you could only ever *write* PKL from now on and add a pkl step to your build process which translates your pkl config your desired format. There's also the interpreter/compiler implementation for different languages, so you could also load pkl files directly from through one of the supported languages (Go, Java, Kotlin, Swift) without the intermediate step to json/yaml/...
@@felixw841 But whats wrong with json schema?
So from my understanding, this is supposed to help checking out projects, where the default config is ommitted from the repository, but you still want a default config to be created on first run, like an ENV bootstrap ?
Or what is this useful for ?
I'm afraid that someone is going to craft some overly complex config with this syntax, becoming hard to understand and edit by others
I swear people undervalue the importance of ease of writing a parser. JSON was designed to be easy to parse; this obviously is not
This concept has already been executed in the form of Dhall and Nickel. Nice to see another competitor, but I’ll stick with Dhall.
Had not heard of DHall or Nickel. Just found their websites and notice that while DHall has a VS Code plug-in, they have no support for JetBrains IDEs. So for that reason alone Pkl is more attractive to me, since I'm spend most of my days in GoLand.
Cool, if that should become available for PHP I will use this straight away. Thanks for sharing.
The fact Go is considered as the first 4, shows Go is going places🔥
I'm all in for built-in declarative validation rules, but built-in programming will make it hard to maintain readability (you don't know the result until the file is executed / compiled). Still will give it a go, though
2:01 I wish Rust had built-in syntax for that. Ranged Ints are cool and all, but it should be built-in for any lang like Rust
apple and open source in the same sentence is funny af
That gives me strong Proto vibes. Looks cool. Especially for data APIs
sure validation is PITA, but why solve it only for file-based config? what about envvars, CLI params and other places such as HTTP endpoints?
once again reinventing the wheel 😅😅
So they recreated DHALL?
Gives me xkcd 927 vibes... "One standard to rule them all"
Oh and what could possibly go wrong if you have a config language that could actually contain logic 🤦
Does it give you those vibes because he showed that exact xkcd comic at 3:46?
@@charliecarrotoh I did not even notice that 😅
I knew Silicon Valleys fondness of pickleball was going to spill over into the collective unconscious.
I like how the guy from Super Troopers agrees with me that PKL is probably the path forward in terms of configuration languages. It encodes a lot of type information, so it follows that with PKL is at least capable to generating any static configuration that requires less information. On the other hand, the fact that it is limited as a programming language guarantees that it will remain focused and stay easy to read.
Don't think kotlin support is mainly about android. Kotlin is used to build ios apps and apps across the Apple eco system. Also it's just a better java and it's able to interop with java so it seems like low hanging fruit though if it's true multi platform kotlin it'll be a bit more that java -> kotlin.
Happy to see Go support as a first class supported language btw!
This feels like a great format for openapi honestly. It's easy to generate clients for APIs if you share the pkl files
Seems pretty nice for testing purposes too.
Could define data structure in pkl and create tests that are invalid.
If you also could import data restrictions from pkl into the code, that would be awesome.
Like defining data structure in pkl and define constraits on the data there, and using data described in the structure in the code would then import the constraints too.
Though exporting logic out of the code is not necessarily that good, but maybe could use some autocomplete function in IDE instead.
Did I miss a way to fix iterating over and parsing arrays and/or objects and mixes of the two? JavaScript's nested for loops or for ins or Lodash etc.. to get properties and values is stupid. Did I miss where Pkl fixes this? The casting of obj/array just to iterate and put in the correct order and other things? Thanks for the video nonetheless.
Til now I’ve just used URLs for configuration, this looks like the first replacement which actually adds useful functionality beyond that.
I've made a bunch of Python tools that all use YAML for config and despite anchors and my own hack for including files, DRY is not straightforward. I'd happily have a bunch of pkl files for my config if there was a way of getting the output into a Python dictionary.
So, they created Cascading Configuration Language; they should have named it CCL.
Given how maintainable the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time CSS turned out to be, I am not so sure that we should consider them creating a cascading configuration language to be a good thing... 🤷♂️
#jmtcw
A few years ago Apple introduced a conditional and declarative configuration mobile device management model to set conditional parameters to be set on the iOS, MacOS operating systems. This seems like the underlying programming framework is pKL.
I've been using Dhall for the last 5 or 6 years, I honestly think the only reason it hasn't caught on is it came from a functional programming background.
I tried something tangentially similar to this - I had a half hearted attempt years ago at SQL -> yaml for minecraft server (modded)
The idea was I would normalize all configuration into a database, and then through a FUSE filesystem mounted over your config folder, it would magically generate confs to read and accept changes written to it. I never finished it but it seemed like a cool idea.
Apple reinventing Nix was unexpected to say the least.
he turned JSON into a pkl, funniest config language I've ever seen
do we get a PKL - SQL Table? oh wait, you're covering that right after I asked... damn
JetBrains editors already have a decent understanding of common config files. package.json for example has the autocomplete that's shown here (it will even do lookups for dependency versions). next.config.js has this too.
But I understand the value of codifying this into something common.
wow thats soooo cool! solves alot of things that i wrote my own stuff for..
It's like what CMAKE is to Make (and other build systems).
A meta-configuration language/syntax to generate/validate configuration files
ngl the most interesting part to me is standardizing the way runtime json gets generated 😮 it’s an easy task but cool not to have to decipher whatever madness someone cooks up to do it
Why would you create a new language with regex support and use strings for regex that need to be escaped? They could use the perl/js regex syntax of a statement surrounded by 2 slashes.
This looks very much like the next log4j vulnerability waiting to happen. I'm always surprised how simple things like logging or configuring can become so overengineered. Also validating configuration options in the config rather than at it's use site strikes me as similar to validating user-submitted data only on the browser side and not the server side... it just feels wrong.
I went over the source code of Pkl and although it support non-string keys in mappings (i.e. more like msgpack than JSON), it looks like very much it only support a subset of YAML 1.1. Since the YAML 1.2 has been out since 2009, that might have to do with the state of YAML parsers/dumpers in the Java/Kotlin, world and not necessarily a conscious choice by the developers. That unfortunately makes it only a potential replacement for a subset of YAML supporting applications, and also not a potential replacement for Python's pickle format.
Sad that they don't have out of the box dotnet support. Just raised an issue about that.
Is it a less powerful nix?
I could see this being useful for generating docker compose files.
I’ve found myself wondering why config files can’t have type hinting. Like being able to see what options are available for a certain property.
that's what IDEs are for
If they keep extending it this way, they'll eventually end up with full blown JavaScript.
Classes, functions, loops and annotations; surely they did not reinvent C# or Java?!
So to prevent using, say, groovy to do this, we now need pkl. That's just replacing 💩 with new 💩.
All this smells too much like XML with xml schema. But a bit better, because XML is a massive 💩🙃
Now can you please do that video on why you love Xcode? 😛