I don't know Jenkins, but my take is that "DSL is good, dynamic full-language config is bad." If you need a fully programmable environment, then you need a ful

I don't know Jenkins, but my take is that "DSL is good, dynamic full-language config is bad." If you need a fully programmable environment, then you need a fully programmable environment. The important thing is that the DSL is a well-defined contract between what you specify and what the underlying software does, so if you say "If X then do Y", then that's exactly what it does. You should be able to follow the DSL line-by-line and debug it. (You've probably noticed that I'm not a fan of declarative languages a la Makefile: you can never figure out where things "start" and "end".) A "full language config" (like Python) is much worse than DSL: usually there's no clear semantics about when any snippet is executed, yet it's powerful enough to bring in the whole outside environment, which is what's going to happen in a team with 5+ people.