My thoughts have been going into another direction entirely:

- We need to get rid of YAML. Not only because it's a horrible file format but also because it lacks proper variables, proper type safety, proper imports, proper anything. To this day, usage & declaration search in YAML-defined infrastructure still often amounts to a repo-wide string search. Why are we putting up with this?

- The purely declarative approach to infrastructure feels wrong. For instance, if you've ever had to work on Gitlab pipelines, chances are that already on day 1 you started banging your head against the wall because you realized that what you wanted to implement is not possible currently – at least not without jumping through a ton of hoops –, and there's already an open ticket from 2020 in Gitlab's issue tracker. I used to think, how could the Gitlab devs possibly forget to think of that one really obvious use case?! But I've come to realize that it's not really their fault: If you create any declarative language, you as the language creator will have to define what all those declarations are supposed to mean and what the machine is supposed to do when it encounters them. Behind every declaration lies a piece of imperative code. Unfortunately, this means you'll need to think of all potential use cases of your language and your declarations, including combinations and permutations thereof. (There's a reason why it's taken so long for CSS to solve even the most basic use cases.) Meanwhile, imperative languages simply let the user decide what they want. They are much more flexible and powerful. I realize I'm not saying anything new here but it often feels like as if DevOps people have forgotten about the benefits of high-level programming languages. Now this is not to say we should start defining all our infrastructure in Java but let's at least allow for a little bit of imperativeness and expressiveness!

A couple of suggestions:

Lock down the prefix string now before it’s too late and document it. I see in Go that it’s lowercase ascii, which seems fine except for compound types (like “article-comment”). May be worth looking at allowing a single separator given that many complex projects (and ORMs) can’t avoid them.

The Go implementation has no tests. This is very unit-testable. Add tests goddammit!

For Go, I’d align with Googles UUID implementation, with proper parse functions and an internal byte array instead of strings. Strings are for rendering (and in your case, the prefix). Right now, it looks like the parsing is too permissive, and goes into generation mode if the suffix is empty. And the SplitN+index thing will panic if no underscores, no? Anyway, tests will tell.

As for the actual design decisions, I tried to poke holes but I fold! I think this strikes the sweet spot between the different tradeoffs. Well done!

There is no tests.

There is just a single test. Which only tests the decoding of a single known value. No encoding test.

Go has infrastructure for benchmarking and fuzzing. Use it!

Also, you took code from https://github.com/oklog/ulid/blob/main/ulid.go which has "Copyright 2016 The Oklog Authors" but this is not mentionned in your base32.go.

I'm not wild about the Crockford encoding. In practice I've found it to be a flat-out mistake when you come to provide technical support or analysis for values encoded this way. The Crockford alphabet is based on design goals that are rarely encountered in practice, such as pronouncing identifiers over the phone. It introduces ambiguity, which is a disaster for grepping logs or any other circumstances where you might query or cross-reference based on the encoded string instead of the decoded value, then permits hyphens, a leading source of cut-and-paste and line-break errors.

Note that people generally do not type in object identifiers, but they do frequently cut-and-paste them between applications and chat/forum interfaces, forward them by email, search for them in log files. Verbal transmission is rare to non-existent. Under these conditions, pronunciation proves irrelevant, and case-insensitivity becomes an impediment, but consistency and paste/break resilience become necessary.

Base 58 offers a bijective encoding that fits these concerns much more effectively and is more compact to boot. Similarly inspired by Stripe, I've been using type-prefixed base58-encoded UUIDs for object identifiers for some years. user_1BzGURpnHGn6oNru84B3Ri etc.

Edit to add: to be fair to Douglas Crockford, his encoding of base 32 was designed two decades ago, when the usage landscape looked quite different.

A couple of suggestions:

Lock down the prefix string now before it’s too late and document it. I see in Go that it’s lowercase ascii, which seems fine except for compound types (like “article-comment”). May be worth looking at allowing a single separator given that many complex projects (and ORMs) can’t avoid them.

The Go implementation has no tests. This is very unit-testable. Add tests goddammit!

For Go, I’d align with Googles UUID implementation, with proper parse functions and an internal byte array instead of strings. Strings are for rendering (and in your case, the prefix). Right now, it looks like the parsing is too permissive, and goes into generation mode if the suffix is empty. And the SplitN+index thing will panic if no underscores, no? Anyway, tests will tell.

As for the actual design decisions, I tried to poke holes but I fold! I think this strikes the sweet spot between the different tradeoffs. Well done!

I've been doing this kind of thing for years with two notable differences:

1. I don't believe people actually hand type-in these values, so I'm not really concerned about the 'l' vs '1' issue. I do base 32 without `eiou` (vowels) to reduce the likelihood of words (profanity) sneaking in.

2. I add two base-32 characters as a checksum (salted of course). This is prevents having to go look at the datastore when the value is bogus either by accident or malice. I'm unsure why other implementations don't do this.

This looks great! Is there a reason one couldn't use this with v4 UUIDs? A quick test shows that they encode/decode just fine. Wondering if I could use the encoded form as a way to niceify our URLs without having to change how the IDs (currently v4 uuids) are stored