4 ms·

I think because there are some desirable traits for config languages that don't exist in general purpose languages. Not exhaustive list but generally: Usually

I think because there are some desirable traits for config languages that don't exist in general purpose languages. Not exhaustive list but generally: Usually constrained to reduce complexity and try to eliminate the need for testing config. Interopable between many different programming languages. Readable by programmers working in different languages. I think this usually makes config languages favour declarative over imperative which usually eliminates most general purpose languages. Another topic is why do we use configuration at all and what is the difference between code and config.

Someone 3y ago
It also is desirable that you can programmatically process configuration files (example: go through all your docker files to determine which ones use vulnerable images) That is at odds with using a generic Turing complete language, as figuring out what the configuration is requires running code that may do all kinds of weird things (download data, delete files, etc) (that is similar to the postscript/PDF case. To figure out how many pages a postscript file has, you have to run code) Now, some will say they trust those writing config files to not do stupid things and only use that power when it is absolutely required, but that’s not an opinion shared by all.