I wrote kubecfg as an unashamed imitation of borgcfg, because for all that we like to complain - borgcfg + GCL + git works extraordinarily well. Kubecfg uses jsonnet, which is similarly openly inspired by GCL (but with some important changes).

https://jsonnet.org/ https://github.com/ksonnet/kubecfg Example real-world usage: https://github.com/anguslees/k8s-home

Disclaimer: I maintain borg’s configuration tool, which was gcl originally.

Gcl is terse, dead simple in most common areas. It appears the best general purpose configuration language I’ve seen so far.

The main caveat of the above is that GCL is so powerful, it's easy to write crazily complex puzzles in it. Just because you can write a mandlebrot fractal generator in your config language, does not mean you should.

And you can bet the person to write the configs of that service you inherited did enjoy seeing quite how far they could stretch the flexibility of GCL...

Well we have good ways to solve these problem, Complexity management in programming language is a well understood problem, I see plenty of low hanging fruits.

Also trrseness has nothing to do with complexity. Gcl did not have much language syntax sugar intended for terseness. It’s just naturally simple in choices of right abstractions.

Hashicorp comes pretty close with their new edition of HCL at least in terms of language. It’s still more flexible in its output (unlike gcl where the output is protos).

If you are familiar with google’s piccolo this is closer to that.