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Cue Does It All, but Can It Literate?

45 points by xlii

by spookylukey

1 subcomments

Please, please - just link to the actual "CUE" project. Not everyone has heard of your favourite thing. The first reference to `CUE` should be a hyperlink.
For other people: I'm pretty sure the author is talking about https://cuelang.org/

by solatic

4 subcomments

Is there anyone out there that has actually, in the real world, realized CUE's promise of bundling type safety + data/configuration + task running in such a way that does not require wrapping it in shell scripts? Can you set up your CI/CD pipelines so that it's literally just invoking some cue cmd, and have that cmd invocation be reasonably portable?
The problem is, once you have to wrap CUE, the loss of flexibility within a special-purpose language like CUE is enough for people to ask why not just bother writing the scripts in a general purpose language with better ecosystem support. And that's a hard sell in corporate environments, even ones that find benefit in type safe languages in general, because they can just pick a general purpose language with a static type checker.

by barries11

2 subcomments

Coincidentally, I recently looked at using CUE as a config file format, but it looked like it was too syntactically complex and unwieldy for them to edit compared to, say, TOML (which is warty-but-usable) or YAML (which is incredibly complex and has too many footguns).
Also, in order to work with it and to understand why their configs weren't working beyond simple error messages or worse, a config file that is technically correct but does something they don't want. To do that, if seems like they'd have to (a) understand unification, (b) be able to find and read the spec files, (c) overcome the syntactic similarity between data and schema, (d) be able to build mental models of why the data and schema combine to cause the symptoms they have. I decided to not use it for that purpose (yet).
I _want_ something like CUE, which is why I was looking at it, so...
Does anyone here have any real-world experience using it as a config and/or data format and ingestion engine for users that are _not_ complexity-loving CS-ophiles like myself who love nothing more than a cool new way of munging data?

by barries11

0 subcomment

ELI5 how this is Literate Programming? See the first example on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming for comparison.
CUE seems like the opposite: a typed data structure used to produce artifacts via a unification algorithm and feeding data to external tools to "render" those artifacts.

by jddj

2 subcomments

Maybe it's unfair, unhelpful or overdone to call out llmisms, but if OP is reading this I stopped reading pretty quickly as a result of things like:
> [CUE] does not just hold the text; it validates that the pieces actually fit. It ensures that the code in your explanation is the exact same code in your final build. It is like having a Lego set where the bricks refuse to click if you are building something structurally unsound.
And that's despite having a passing interest in both cue and LP