> There are a few fundamental differences between these languages, but it's just plain wrong to say that any of them are not "structured." Did OP mean "schema-l

> There are a few fundamental differences between these languages, but it's just plain wrong to say that any of them are not "structured." Did OP mean "schema-less" instead? I read him as referencing what people would have called "structured programming" in the 1980s, and pointing out that we have these settings/metadata/control files in languages that have no capacity for "structure" in the sense that, say, Pascal or C would have over BASIC or assembly, that is, thin-to-no factoring or abstraction capacity. Hence the contrast with "Configuration as Code." Now, depending on your personality and experience, you might find the idea of using a complete language as config an opportunity for someone to do something non-obvious or horrifying, and the closer to the "settings" end of the setting/metadata/control spectrum you're on the more plausible that position is. When you get to a level of complexity that's the other end I'm not so sure and horizontally scaling systems might well be arriving there.