Re: [extremeprogramming] About placing configuration defaults

 On Thursday, 21 November 2019, 18:48:35 GMT, George Paci <[email protected]> wrote:
 
>Yes. Glyph Lefkowitz (one of the main Twisted developers) has a good 
rant about configuration formats that become configuration languages 
that become Turing-complete and thereby less useful for configuration.  

I once worked on a project where we re-implemented a legacy system; our entire codebase was smaller than the *config files alone* for the legacy system.
It was a nightmare of tiny software components glued together with Spring XML,with several layers of Spring inheritance and no tool support.
The legacy config was so complex we had to dig out a a special semi-formaldiagramming methodology to understand how it worked.For any given component it was difficult to understand if it was even executed at all, never mind how.

>I can't find it now, but here's a related thing he wrote:

>> The formats of configuration files have shown two visible trends over 
the years. On the one hand, more and more

>> programmability has been added, until sometimes they become a new 
language. The extreme end of this trend is

>> using a regular programming language, such as Python, as the 
configuration language. 

If used tastefully, this can work really well, because you can refactor duplication, using variables, loops, functions etc,and make a much cleaner configuration.
Of course, with great power comes great responsibility.
David.

  

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