I find that to be pretty spot on... The cloud companies are making a lot of stuff point and click, and cut and paste YAML, so you don't have to use shell, but I

I find that to be pretty spot on... The cloud companies are making a lot of stuff point and click, and cut and paste YAML, so you don't have to use shell, but I think programmers are better off learning and using shell. I have been using Nix for most system-level stuff the last two years (development environments, building container images, declaratively managing systems). It is far more powerful than YAML configuration (it's a turing-complete functional language after all), but the functional aspect brings many benefits (no side-effects, etc.). Of course, nix(pkgs) stdenv makes liberal use of Bourne shell in its build phases, so a bit of shell chops is very useful there as well.