Declarative vs imperative. Languages have state and behavior. I've had to convert 50k class-based schemas to a declarative DSL; the requirement is to be declar

Declarative vs imperative. Languages have state and behavior. I've had to convert 50k class-based schemas to a declarative DSL; the requirement is to be declarative, not rely on external state. and portable as-is with as little interpretation as possible. The flexibility of a language means some bug deep in a library will cause your infra to delete or misconfigureitself on accident. An API requires transactions or at the very least a read-modify-write cycle. The API need to always be up so engineers can merge their modifications to infrastructure. Recovery and undo is also a problem that needs to be solved so you need a system with point in time recovery. My Preference is to have an actual language generate what the system will do in a human-readable format, and you check that in, but Git and JSON or YAML with a Proto DSL act as the API, and then anything that can write a flat file can be used to configure your system.