> The idea of declarative config is that empirically programmatic config was bad at scale. Languages can be declarative or imperative. For instance, Pulumi and

> The idea of declarative config is that empirically programmatic config was bad at scale. Languages can be declarative or imperative. For instance, Pulumi and CDK are declarative. > If you use programmatic config, then you can't find out the intended state of your system without executing a program. You can't grep through program executions in a meaningful way, especially at scale. So you can't do even simple things like search for a string. I don’t understand — nothing stops a language from having an intermediate compilation step that shows the intended state and is searchable. Beyond that, programmatic config means you can add in hooks to make plans or runs more interrogatable. > Guaranteeing termination is helpful, but it doesn't solve the main problem that programmatic config puts a large complexity barrier between you and the ability to understand your infrastructure. It seems like this is untrue — having seen templated IaC that is hundreds of thousands of lines and cdk that defers that complexity to an abstraction that I have to understand once, I’d always take the latter. Agreed that helm use is a giant mistake and liability.