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C is a standard, approved by standards bodies, and with multiple implementations on multiple platforms pledged to be supported for ages.

Someone's Puppet and Ansible scripts for some tasks are no comparison to C the standard, and do not come with the breadth, stability, or support of C.



What does that have to do with the analogy? Nobody compared C to Puppet.

The point was that it's common to forget about details on a different level of abstraction to the one you normally operate. Doesn't matter if it's an ANSI standard or a hand-rolled DSL for a very niche use case.


I meant, C replacing assembly in the skill sets of the vast majority of us is still okay because it's widely supported, unlike many — as you put it — hand-rolled DSLs replacing few standard ways of configuring things.


There was never any standard though. sshd.conf is one hand-rolled DSL, smb.conf is another, httpd.conf is another...


But there is only one sshd_config with the exact same manual across all the servers across all companies that use it (distro and version differences notwithstanding). If you know what the PasswordAuthentication option in sshd_config means at one company, you know what it means at any other company, unlike each one's way of maintaining the file.




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