It is possible to have a programming language with well defined semantics, the ability to have libraries and utility functions and other nice things, while not

It is possible to have a programming language with well defined semantics, the ability to have libraries and utility functions and other nice things, while not requiring Turing completeness or the need to always expose file I/O etc. This allows reproducibility and not hitting things like the halting problem in your config file. See Starlark, which is a subset of Python used by the Bazel build system - https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark