Gabriel Gonzalez, "Dhall: A Programmable Configuration Language"
Channel: Houston FPUG
Date: 2021-08-12

Dhall is a domain-specific language for enriching configuration files with programming features like types, functions, and imports. The built-in language security features (such as strong normalization, integrity checks, and restricted side effects) distinguishes Dhall from other programmable configuration languages. The talk will begin by showing how to use Dhall as plain configuration file format in a manner similar to JSON and then slowly introduce programming language features to improve maintainability. Afterwards the talk will highlight the language security guarantees by demonstrating how to create a server that can safely interpret untrusted Dhall client code server-side.

Bio: Gabriel is a Haskell evangelist who believes that total functional programming is the future of software engineering.  He’s most well-known for his blog (haskellforall.com) and for originally authoring Dhall.