I think codegen/compilation is a middle ground here. A higher level language like starlark can be compiled down to a set of instructions that provide the descri

I think codegen/compilation is a middle ground here. A higher level language like starlark can be compiled down to a set of instructions that provide the described guarantees. This is how Pants (build system) works. You have declarative Starlark which supports basic programming semantics and this generates a state the engine reads and tries to produce. I've been meaning to dive into jsonnet for a while but it'd be good to have a higher level representation that didn't rely on sophisticated templating and substitution engines like current k8s. Compare k8s to Terraform where you have modules, composability, variables. These can be achieved in k8s but you need to layer more tooling on (kustomize, helm, etc). There could be a richer config system than "shove it in YAML" Things like explicit ordering and dependencies are hard to represent in pure yaml since they're ",just text fields" without additional tools