I agree with pretty much everything you wrote but: > It’s just that with Python etc — vs YAML “programming” in “code” — they are more likely to actually get it

I agree with pretty much everything you wrote but: > It’s just that with Python etc — vs YAML “programming” in “code” — they are more likely to actually get it right. Are they, though? My impression from various projects involving a good amount of YAML files (for CI pipelines, k8s deployment and such) has been that countless things that take me seconds in python (declare and pass around a variable, find out what a line of code does, find out where else a variable is used) take me orders of magnitude longer in declarative DSLs (like anything YAML-based) than in imperative languages like Python. In 99 of 100 cases I have to either consult the docs (because I don't understand what a given declaration means) or resort to string search (yes, string search) across one or – god forbid – multiple repositories. Meanwhile, imperative code at least tells me what it does and tooling support (usage search etc.) also tends to be very good. YAML hell is real.