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I think Steve Yegge got it right when he wrote:

I know, I know — everyone raves about the power of separating your code and your data . . . But it's [not] what you really want, or all the creepy half-languages wouldn't all evolve towards being Turing-complete, would they?

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem

Templating YAML is the same, but... Honestly, Jsonnet is too. If you're going to generate JSON — by god use a normal programming language. You have to teach your team one fewer thing (approximately no one knows Jsonnet); it already integrates with your existing build system; if you wrote a useful util function in your main codebase you can reuse it; if you have a typechecker or a linter you can use it; etc etc.




Does it mean that Lisps 'code is data' is the right idea in the end?


IMO yes, although sadly Lisp is a pretty unwieldy language to do it in — it truly needs a little more syntax sugar for readability's sake. (Also a decent type checker would help.)




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