HN user
This is the most common complaint I see for switching interactive shells to fish/nushell, but it's not a problem in practice. You don't ever uninstall bash, so if you've got a command to paste:
bash <enter>
<paste> <enter>
exit <enter>
Can confirm; my team spent the past 9 months upgrading an application JDK 8 -> 17, and there were breaking changes even after we got it compiling + running
I would highly recommend the ts-pattern [1] library if you find yourself wanting exhaustive switch statements! The syntax is a bit noiser than case statements in simple cases, but I find it less awkward for exhaustive pattern matching and much harder to shoot yourself in the foot with. Once you get familiar with it, it can trim down a /lot/ of more complicated logic too.
It also makes match expressions an expression rather than a statement, so it can replace awkward terenaries. And it has no transitive dependencies!
It almost always breaks every possibility to programmatically process or analyze the config. You can't just JSON.parse the file and check it.
Counterpoint: 95% of config-readers are or could be checked in with all the config they ever read.
I have yet to come across a programming language where it is easier to read + parse + type/structure validate a json/whatever file than it is to import a thing. Imports are also /much/ less fragile to e.g. the current working directory. And you get autocomplete! As for checks, you can use unit tests. And types, if you've got them.
I try to frame these guys as "data values" rather than configuration though. People tend to have less funny ideas about making their data 'clean'.
The only time where JSON.parse is actually easier is when you can't use a normal import. This boils down to when users write the data and have practical barriers to checking in to your source code. IME such cases are rare, and most are bad UX.
Side effects in constructors
Putting such things in configuration files will not save you from people DRYing out the config files indirectly with effectful config processing logic. I recently spent the better part of a month ripping out one such chimera because changing the data model was intractable.
I came across https://kdl.dev recently, and it has become my favored yaml-replacement when normal code doesn't work.
The data model is closer to XML than JSON, though, so unfortunately it's not a drop-in replacement for yaml.
Small sample:
package {
name my-pkg
version "1.2.3"
dependencies {
// Nodes can have standalone values as well as // key/value pairs.
lodash "^3.2.1" optional=#true alias=underscore
}
}Very roughly, Zig is much closer to Go in terms of philosophy of language design, where as Rust is much closer to Go in terms of the kind of software people write with it.
Go and Zig are both aggressively small and portable languages, and e.g. prefer explicit `defer` where Rust would handle cleanup implicitly. Unlike Zig, Go and Rust are both widely used and mature ~tier-1 languages with a deep bench of native libraries. However, there's a deep gulf between their philosophies. Go values a shallow learning curve and making code easy to write, whereas Rust values expressivness and making it hard to write bad code. This is not to say that you can't write Good Software in Go or make money with Rust code. However, the languages tend to attract distinct groups of programmers, and there's a reason flamewars crop up between their proponents with unusual regularity.
Zig is notable for targeting C's niches of having lots of structural flexibility in memory management, being good at calling C code, and building C programs. C is the native language of most truly powerful interfaces (operating systems, graphics, cryptography, databases, other programming languages, device drivers, low-level networking, etc.), and programs primarily concerned with interfacing with such things tend to be better off written in C. Working with C code is in the happy path for Zig, while other mainstream programming languages demand significant specialized expertise or wrapper libraries (1). Wrapper libraries aren't always available, are almost always less useful than the original, and only save you /some/ build headaches. This makes Zig a candidate in many situations where C - and /maybe/ C++ - are the only real competition.
In short:
If your interest is learning new ways to think about writing programs, Rust will give you a more distinct perspective than Zig. Like Go, there will be lots of libraries and guides to help you out.
If your interest is in learning to write a kind of program you couldn't in Go and think "closer to the metal", Zig is likely better suited to task.
(1): This isn't nearly as true for C++, but there's still enough impeadence mismatch between idiomatic C and C++ to invite interfacing bugs and wrapper libraries.
The author addresses this nicely in an earlier part of the blog book: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2025/fp_lessons_purity/
The way zod and arktype generally handle this is by providing treating the schema as the source of truth, rather than a type. They then provide a way to define the type in terms of the schema:
// zod 3 syntax
import { z } from 'zod'
const RGB = z.schema({
red: z.number(),
green: z.number(),
blue: z.number(),
})
type RGB = z.infer<typeof RGB>
// same thing as:
// type RGB = { red: number; green: number; blue: number };
For what it's worth, I have come to prefer this deriving types from parsers approach to the other way around.
I must further prothelitize Amazon Ion, which solves for most of the listed complaints and is criminally underused:
https://amazon-ion.github.io/ion-docs/
The "object and array need to be entirely and deep parsed" and "object and array cannot be streamed when writing" are somewhat incompatible from a (theoretical) parsing perspective, though; you need to know how far to skip ahead in order to do so.
I agree that it is silly to design an efficiency-oriented format that does neither, though. Ion chooses to be shallow parsed efficiently, although it also makes affordances for streams of top-level values explicitly in the spec.
In this context, I think the prime advantage would be that instead of: - Managing/setting Ubuntu/$distro for the host - Installing Docker compose on host - Writing a docker-compose.yaml file to declare your container architecture - (potentially) Writing a systemd service to bring docker-compose up with the host boot
You just: - Mange/setup nixos - Add container architecture definition to nixos config
The containers, being systemd units, would have all the normal systemd log management like the rest of your system, instead of having to dig through docker-compose logs with a different mechanism than "normal" systemd service logs.
You'd also get all the normal benefits of a nixos system: the config file can be placed on a new system to completely reproduce the system state (modulo databases et all), rollbacks are trivial, etc.
For the TUI inclined, lazygit [1] and magit (emacs) [2] both have quick and intuitive ways of handling this. They're also both wonderful companions to the git cli for day to day version control.
If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend checking out Amazon's Ion data format: https://amazon-ion.github.io/ion-docs/
It's schemaless, so the binary format can't be as effecient as protobufs, but IMO the minor overhead is worth not paying the costs protobuf has to.
The text format (which is interoperable) is a strict superset of JSON that resolves many of the issues ziggy tackles (tagged unions, comments, verbosity, multiline strings), although not quite as prettily for configs.
I can't seem to find this Dell monitor on your site: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-43-4k-usb-c-...
If you control the underlying data, I must reccomend Amazon Ion! Its text format is a strict superset of JSON, but they also maintain binary format that will round-trip data and is designed for efficient scanning. There's even prefixed annotations if you want them :)
It also specs proper decimal values, mitigating the issues presented in the OP.