This reminds me of Alan Kay's OOPSLA 1997 presentation "The Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet" when he describes the Air Force / Burroughs 220 file format from 1961 where the file/tape contained both the data and the procedures to read/write/print them: https://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY?t=1355

With Red Hat's UBI Micro:

  microcontainer=$(buildah from registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/ubi-micro)
  micromount=$(buildah mount $microcontainer)
  yum install \
      --installroot $micromount \
      --releasever 8 \
      --setopt install_weak_deps=false \
      --nodocs -y \
      httpd

(from https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introduction-ubi-micro published in 2021)

great. Now I have to install and learn another tool when having yum inside the container will just work?

Not just that but it will probably break later and ruin everything

Speaking about high agency workers, this Company as Code framework reminds me a lot of SaaSiroth introduced in https://youtu.be/dLTUqPue9sQ?si=OIxmP5_D-YZZD2UO&t=200 (KRAZAM: High Agency Individual Contributor).

Maybe not "elegant", but quite readable compiler impl. compared to what I have seen. And which (real world) compiler has an "elegant" implementation anyways.

There's a nice Manning book from 2014 about this way of working named The Mikado Method.

Adding product location would be great! As a resident of the European Union I'm unlikely to order one of these mini PCs from the USA due to import taxes and additional shipping costs.

Looks like it: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...

> aching for some higher level abstraction

CI/CD components (GA since 17.0) improve the situation a notch: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/components/

Also CI/CD steps

Reminds me of this previous effort to build upon Go but add a more flexible type system: https://github.com/oden-lang/oden

> […] they have 4 lines of code in Wing, but the long Pulumi example sets up permissions. So how did the permissions get set up in Wing?

As it says on the page: "Wing allows developers to write very few lines of code and let the compiler take care of IAM policies and other cloud mechanics."

Basically it auto-generates least-privilege IAM policies.

> Basically it auto-generates least-privilege IAM policies.

Nice!