This so much. Every time you have to use another configuration language you have to learn all the quirks (ex: "" == undef in puppet), Give up all your powerful

This so much. Every time you have to use another configuration language you have to learn all the quirks (ex: "" == undef in puppet), Give up all your powerful tools (like a debugger) and learn new abstractions. It's extremely counterproductive and it usually would have been better to have simple data structure that you generate from a program written in a traditional language (which the team can artificially restrict to avoid recursion if they want.) Also IMO there's no such thing as a "declarative language." These are just languages where almost everything has a side affect of mutating a data structure that you don't have an easy way of inspecting or debugging.