Thoughts on #Hugo and static site generators in general. TL/DR: I'm not a fan.
ugh that sounds nasty. I glanced once at the site generator landscape and ran away screaming. I was hoping maybe something usable had emerged but... at least this one doesn't seem to be it.
@natecull @teleclimber silly question, but do you have preferences for config/markup/template/query/data/metadata formats?
@natecull @teleclimber plenty of opportunity to fuck up outside of choices for those, but i am curious , some people get pretty fussy about it.
I don't actually much like any current markup/query/config formats, which is why I've been trying to brew my own (slightly extended Lisp S-expressions).
My problem with most markup formats is that they start out thinking 'oh it's okay, don't sweat the syntax, nobody will ever need to do $BIG_THING in it' and always, always, sometimes within six months, they have to do $BIG_THING in it.
Every markup format becomes a Turing-complete programming language. Law of nature.
But is turing completeness a real problem here? What if your static site generator does not terminate? It's not like it affects the actual "runtime" (people visiting the result), and you can do a lot of stuff more cleanly with a proper programming language.
Of course, a compiler not terminating is bad, but here we're talking more about libraries to build your own custom compiler, which does not need to be held to the same high standards.
@zensaiyuki @teleclimber
@fgaz @natecull @teleclimber the problem comes from the sorta stuff the blog post is complaining about. sooner or later complexity is going to seep in somewhere, and it’s a choice about where you put that complexity. the filesystem, and subtleties in naming are the wrong choice. similar problems would arise from starting with a “simple” non turing complete markup/templating language and trying to force it to do something outside the original usecases that it wasn’t designed for
@fgaz @natecull @teleclimber a good example is the mustache templating language. really great for most things. but then you need a simple way of feeding in an array and getting a numbered list. or you just want to print out the keys and values of an object and it doesn’t provide a way to print keys. or you need to show a different bit of content depending on the contents of a value. mustache can’t do any of that, so you either put more logic in code outside of mustache, or you make handlebars
@fgaz @natecull @teleclimber and before you know it, handlebars 5.0 is a full featured programming language
@fgaz @natecull @teleclimber (i heart mustache and handlebars, but its limitations make a good example)
or you get fed up with the limitations of mustache and we just promiscuously mix html and javascript like people do with react.js. just mix all that shit together. the circle is complete.
@fgaz @natecull @teleclimber we’re now to the point where people are noticing how much of a pain it is to individually feed bits of configuration to each react component and are reinventing CSS but as a janky javascript framework that reads theme variables from a json file.
@fgaz @natecull @teleclimber of course this all leads to Gall’s Law, and its corrolary, Greenspun’s Tenth Rule
@fgaz @natecull @teleclimber i found this one: “Tesler’s Law” or “the law of conservation of complexity”, every system has an irreducible level of complexity, and the only choice is where to put it: on the users, the application developers or the platform developers.
@zensaiyuki @fgaz @teleclimber
I feel like there's maybe a rider to this:
if you divide a system into modules such that the complexity is in the correct modules, overall system complexity lowers. If you put the complexity in the wrong modules, overall system complexity rises (potentially exponentially if you got the module divisions super wrong).
ergo you can tell if you've decomposed a system correctly by how much non-essential complexity the system as a whole has.
@zensaiyuki @fgaz @teleclimber
this is a rule I just now made up so I have no idea if it holds in real life
@natecull @fgaz @teleclimber i recently read a thing that outlined a way to spotcheck the complexity of a system by expressing lines of communication between modules as a graph. the goal is you want the graph to be representable in 2D without any of the edges crossing over each other.
@natecull @fgaz @teleclimber and by “recently” i apparently mean some point in the last 6 years.
@zensaiyuki @fgaz @teleclimber
I think platform churn is a huge driver of complexity. Complexity that's 'essential' for the person having to solve the short-term problem of 'getting the system running on platform X, and then platform Y, and then platform Z'. but not really essential to the long-term problem of 'this just needs to run, somehow'.
I guess that means system design is increasingly a social problem. "What culture do I trust with my system? What are their demands on it, and me?"
@zensaiyuki @fgaz @teleclimber
It turns out that Silicon Valley Culture is a very high-maintenance culture for anyone for whom constant disruption is.... well, a disruption.
Server run by the main developers of the project 
It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!
@zensaiyuki @fgaz @teleclimber
And unfortunately, Free/Open Source Culture didn't entirely make Silicon Valley Culture better. It mitigated some of the worst parts (the ability for a company to completely evaporate big chunks of infrastructure software with copyright). It didn't quite mitigate all the endless loops of trend-chasing and the dominance of big money with small ethics on what free code gets written. Maybe that part didn't even come from Silicon Valley but somewhere deeper.