Trigger warning: this is a silly rant I wrote a few years ago after raging at the Hugo blog engine for a couple hours. I think its funny and still relevant, so hyperbolic nonsense incoming!
DSL’s (Domain Specific Languages) are often terrible. Each DSL is a special snowflake, delicately floating from the heavens straight into in your eye.
The problem with a DSL is that it always starts so simple. You take a complex problem and represent it simply with some nice pretty syntax. Everything is great until: “can we just do this one edge case real quick?” Over time, it grows into a whole inner platform often re-creating the whole outer platform it was intended to simplify. The DSL becomes a buggy version of the outer system, but often it has less clear semantics and documentation. Because many DSL’s are designed to be “not a programming language”, eventually they become far worse: a programming language written in psuedo-English. And we all know how regular and clear English is!
Any Examples? You betcha
For example: the DSL for filtering posts in the Hugo blog engine. (I otherwise love Hugo. Whooo, go Hugo!) But time to lay out some tough love. The built-in templating DSL is the worst. Straight Go would be fine. The docs for Go are great, and Go is so magically easy. But unfortunately a special DSL is here to poop in your soup.
How do I filter for the top pages that are posts and not drafts? Let’s see what doesn’t work:
{{ range first 5 (where .Site.Pages (and ("Type" "post") (not .Draft))) }}
{{ range first 5 (where and (.Site.Pages "Type" "post") (not .Draft)) }}
{{ range first 5 (where (and (.Site.Pages "Type" "post") (not .Draft))) }}
Maybe the parens mess it up?
{{ range first 5 (where .Site.Pages "Type" "post" and .Draft) }}
> ERROR: <and>: wrong number of args for and: want at least 1 got 0 in theme/partials/homepage.html
Perhaps parens again?
{{ range first 5 (where (and (.Site.Pages "Type" "post") .Draft)) }}
> ERROR: <where>: wrong number of args for where: want at least 2 got 1 in theme/partials/homepage.html
Ah, so where is a special DSL function TOO! No simple bool argument for
where, nah, it: Filters an array to only elements containing a matching value for a given field. which I can only assume means the arguments are where(list field value). Obviously.
Maybe I could intersect the results of two where expressions? Nope, only supports ints and floats.
Perhaps a quick search for this exact issue will help? Look, someone on the forum has a question about this! Click the link, “You must be signed in to see this thread”.
Google cache still has the text! Someone reported this as a bug with where!
Fixed Dec 2015! What build of Hugo am I using? Nov 2015!
Annnnd after upgrading Hugo, now I just an unexplained panic: index out of range when
building the site.
FML. I’ll just put in the URL’s by hand, like a savage.
