No particular problem with parens, hell if you want to do postfix I’m cool with that too, it’s just that the leading parens really discourage you from currying

No particular problem with parens, hell if you want to do postfix I’m cool with that too, it’s just that the leading parens really discourage you from currying by default while ML-style juxtaposition-is-application does not (normally ML and F# curry a bit less, Haskell and Scala a bit more, but both curry much more than is usual in Common Lisp or Scheme). And currying is really useful when some of the curried functions are values of config settings. I didn’t think HCL had laziness (which is vital to how NixOS module or Nixpkgs overlay A can set or use things in B which in turn set or use things in A), I’ll have to look at the theory more closely, thanks. (Its documentation tries pretty hard to make HCL look boring and weak, I guess it’s my fault for believing it.) Doing logic-programming-like things would probably also work as an approach to achieving these goals, yes, just a different one from that implied by my constraints above. I’d count CUE as being interesting in that direction as well even if it’s not technically logic programming (is it?.. the bibliography is not great). I’ll guess we’ll see.