> I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen.
I only worked with 4-5 SREs and they all grudgingly tolerated it. What did you like about it, compared to other infra languages you've used professionally?
Every SRE I've worked with has said different things, though at the time the controversy was around Piccolo. It flip-flopped between shiny new thing vs deprecated. Then the SREs I worked with got laid off, and I started cargo-culting the Piccolo we had lying around.
See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49216714. The hatred of BCL was due to people not understanding the benefits of a restricted language with carefully chosen semantics, and stubbornly insisting in "a real programming language".
In 2015, the SRE org started project "Prod 2020", with the goal of unifying the SRE stacks and modernizing the web tools. It was quite successful.
If by "web tooling" you mean the tools for producing public-facing HTML services, those were used by a surprisingly small percentage of developers.
> But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.
I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen.