RE: "I like many things about Ansible, but the 'language' is an unreadable mess that makes termcap[1] feel like genius level UX design."

I've been a puppet user, and long time chef user, and recently been using ansible for a couple of projects, but I can't learn to like the 'language' at all. I feel like ansibles YAML syntax is just hiding the complexity of configuration management from you. Which at first as a novice ansible and CM user, or for small projects is great! You can be super productive, and anyone can understand it in your team.

However, as your systems get more complex, I feel like doing anything remotely complex with it produces confusing, hacky, unreadable ansible 'code'. Then you try to scale this working in a team, and try to do any useful testing, or re-use/extend/share any roles, your kind of doomed.

The reason I continue to use chef is because its a ruby DSL that you can easily extend, where anyone who can code; can write, test and understand. While I find Ansible is just templated YAML, and means you dont have to understand how to program.

I guess my point is, configuration management is kind of hard. I feel like people use Ansible because 'its easy', and I hear people say 'Ansible is easy' a lot. But in the end, Ansible, the tool chain, workflows and syntax will become just as complex as chef/puppet/saltstack when you operate it at scale.

I think we have to distinguish two things going on in Ansible files.

1) It's declarative. So if you are looking for a procedural language, you will be disappointed. It's also declarative for good reason IMHO.

2) It's still hacky. If the 'language' remained entirely declarative then the YAML syntax _might_ have been ok, but the language looks like a poor design stretched beyond it's limits.

Some people don't like the Ansible language for reason 1 or some for reason 2.

Personally, I prefer that it's declarative, the file is supposed to describe the features the target system must have, and then the module, which is procedural, has to figure out how to make that happen on whatever target system is in question.

That separation keeps things clean, idempotent (most times) and neat.

I think procedural approaches _seem_ better because they are familiar to programmers, but they can become complex, non-idempotent and hard to debug.

I've used Ansible quite a bit, and I could sometimes sum it up as, "the worst one, except for its alternatives".

I tend to think of Ansible as supporting a flexible combination of declarative and procedural approaches. Within a particular sequence of tasks, it's procedural. Those lists of tasks are typically combined into a role or the like that is typically more declarative in its application. Of course application of roles is actually procedural in that it happens in the same obvious order it's defined, but the higher level organizational constructs like roles have more of a declarative feel to me (I'd assume that's by design).

Ansible has none of the things that make declarative languages good, though. Good Declarative languages allow composition - Having a base object, adding properties to it, overriding others. Ansible handles none of that in it's playbook syntax or it's vars syntax. In the role and module syntax, sure, but they're turing complete anyway.

I agree that it's crufty.

If I were them I'd sunset the old syntax in the next version, create a conversion tool that works for 90% of cases and then drop support for the old file format.

But that's what I would do, and it would probably kill the project.

As soon as people can't cut and paste Ansible 1.x roles from github into their project, Ansible would probably start to wither.[1]

That's the typical workflow. You need to do something on your linux box. You google that, find a decent Ansible solution, cut and paste a few text files maybe modify it a bit and repeat.

[1] And this s another reason declarative syntax is so awesome, because it's easy to snap roles together like lego bricks.

Every time I let the config management stuff slide slowly towards procedural, bad things have happened.

You want your config management templates to be as declarative as possible. "This is the desired final state", and that's it. Of course, in practice it's very hard to stay 100% declarative, but it's very good practice to try and keep it close to ideal.

Agreed, this is a great way to think about it. I think Ansible is at its best when the modules handle the imperative stuff behind the scenes, and the playbook just declares. That's not always possible, but the modules are getting better and better.

FWIW I also found YAML to be very confusing syntactically at first; things got easier once I realized that it's basically 1-to-1 with JSON, and could convert to JSON to get intuition for the file structure (simple yaml2json script here: http://pastebin.com/TpjZLnLa). Thumbing through the book Ansible Up and Running also helped.

In the long run, putting a declarative idempotent layer atop the same old mutable infra is tough but a necessary compromise right now. It'll be great if the immutable-first tools of today (nixos et al) mature and we can leave this behind.

I speculate that Ansible choose YAML under the premise that it would lower the barrier to entry as opposed to a real language like Python or whatever. That would be nice if everything were just a matter of configurations, in which case YAML would be just as good as JSON, if not better.

The problem is that because people want logic, Ansible ended up introducing an idiosyncratic YAML-templating language that's not actually YAML or anything else. Now people write large system deployment scripts in this weird YAML that I don't ever want to look at.

JSON is crap for configuration. Its picky with quotes, doesn't like trailing commas, and isn't as readable as other options.

JSON is the example, not the prescription; JSON is just a widely used format for arbitrarily nested data. You can use Javascript objects (or Python dictionaries) if you want. Again, this example applies for the scenario if Ansible playbooks were only configurations. If it were only configurations, then fine, let's go with readable YAML.

If Ansible were playbooks with only configurations, then even XML would be okay, because in the sum of all pros and cons, this would be a tiny factor. The pickiness of quotes and trailing commas is really whatever here.

But instead Ansible playbooks use a "readable" YAML-ish language. The price is not right.