[chef-dev] Re: Dialect support and loading enhancements

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Sep 19, 2013, at 5:54 PM, Adam Jacob 
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 wrote:

> 3) My concern about dialects is really that, in the end, you wind up 
> hitting a wall. In the grand tradition of manipulexity and whipuptude, we 
> know there is a path that can provide both (the ruby dsl), but that we 
> think there are some barriers to it's full whipuptidunal potential (too 
> many directories, etc.) Is it really simpler to learn the syntax from yaml, 
> and all the gotchas that might be implied there, than to learn the basic 
> syntax that you know scales moving forward? I think ansible and salt both 
> provide a delightful experience of immediacy to the consumer, and that 
> experience is a great one to mimic - but I'm not sure I think that path is 
> because you're writing YAML rather than ruby. Is this simply because I know 
> more than one programming language and have no inherent fear of learning 
> another one anymore?

I'm not a programmer/developer.  I may have encountered a variety of 
languages, but I've never really been a programmer/developer.  I'm an ops guy 
who can do a little light scripting.

At this stage, I think you have pretty much reached the entire audience of 
people who are already programmers (and especially already Ruby programmers), 
and the next raft of customers are going to be more and more like me -- 
largely self-taught operations people.  Sure, you can give them reference 
material to help guide them through Ruby enough to do a little simple Chef, 
but that's like giving someone a simplified guide "Just enough French to 
survive in Paris".

Either are okay for tourists who will be there for a few days, but the people 
who are going to be living there long-term really need to properly learn 
French -- or, in our case, Ruby.  And I'm sorry, I'm just not a natural 
linguist -- I tried to learn French during the seven-plus years I lived in 
Belgium, and it literally went in one ear and out the other.  Ruby is and 
will always be an alien thing for me.  For that matter, the same is true for 
Python, or C, or Cobol, or any of the other programming languages I've been 
exposed to over the thirty-plus years I've been mucking about with computers. 
 The closest I can come to any native computer language is Bourne shell (not 
bash), and even that's just due to relatively intense exposure over a long 
period of time -- since 1984.

If we can change the rules of the game so that people don't have to learn 
Ruby to handle the easy 80% of the work, then they can deal in something more 
closely resembling a language they can understand, and leave the hard 20% 
stuff for someone who has the necessary talents and aptitudes.


The other analogy I would make is to music -- just because you give someone a 
musical instrument and you force them through the torture of music lessons 
for a few years, doesn't necessarily mean that they will be a talented 
musician that should perform in front of a crowd of thousands.


So, yes -- to me, YAML is a game changer.  Even if that's not your "native" 
language for the system, it's close enough to English (and other "natural" 
languages) that people can get up to speed much faster with it, and they can 
be more proficient and retain more proficiency over time.

--
Brad Knowles 
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LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>