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I like this. Go "har har har yaml" all you like, but this reads a damn lot better than AWS step functions and seems way more powerful.

There are a number of tasks that benefit from something like this, and there are a huge number of advantages from being able to encode steps in domain specific languages such as YAML and have them execute with truly "no code".



This is not "no code". This is code, imperative code even, in a really bizarre format.


You're not wrong, but there is always going to be code involved when instructing a machine to perform some actions. By "no code" (and the reason it was in quotes) was that it's almost no superfluous code at all. No libraries to bundle, functions to define, bundles to upload, etc.

"I want to call an API, and if it's a Tuesday and the response contains 'foo' trigger another API" seems pretty simple with this. That's not to say it wasn't "simple" before, but there was definitely _more code_.


You could get much the same effect with an actual programming language and some conveniently pre-loaded libraries/APIs.


Yep, that's pretty much a lambda. But then you need to sandbox the execution because really it can do anything, which adds overhead at scale.

And is it really that much better? I think not.


If you want to do anything nontrivial, yes, probably. This hacked-together YAML syntax seems very irritating to write more complex programs in. And it probably needs sandboxing of its own to some extent, as it looks like it can do infinite loops.


yaml is not a language. it's a serialization format.

this thing here is a language that serializes into yaml. there are zero benefits of using it except perhaps 'it is yaml so i don't have to compile my configuration'.

note that xml with xslt would have handle it better.


> there are zero benefits of using it

There are many, many benefits from having steps defined in a restrictive, tightly-controlled language that doesn't require sandboxing.

There are also many benefits to not using XML and XSLT, not least of all user experience.


Well, you don't have to write a parser. The parser is already written for you (yaml parser). But I have no idea why that'd be an advantage, especially for Google, they surely know how to write a parser...




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