This was posted on hacker news sometime ago,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567408 -> http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/

I think it is relevant to this discussion. Having used Puppet before ansible, I tend to agree with it.

The point is that it's not turing complete. Thus it's more readable, less susceptible to technical debt and less susceptible to bugs and always by definition, declarative.

Turing complete code turns into an unreadable mess far more easily.

But isn't in fact Turing complete?

It has variables, control structures, loops and exceptions.

That does not make it Turing complete.

"You need some form of dynamic allocation construct (malloc ornew or cons will do) and either recursive functions or some other way of writing an infinite loop. If you have those and can do anything at all interesting, you're almost certainly Turing-complete." -- http://stackoverflow.com/a/449170

There is a do-until loop: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_loops.html#id22

Which satisfies the infinite loop issue.

Have not looked carefully at the dynamic allocation, but I am guessing (hand waving here....) that it could be accomplished.

Power comes at the price of complexity. If you want to write your playbooks in lisp, ansible is not the way to go.