I agree, static data structures are far from ideal. Practically speaking, there's not much more you can accomplish with YAML or JSON compared to XML, even if some people find the syntax more palatable.

Also, trying to shoehorn conditions and loops into a non-Turing Complete language is cumbersome. I would imagine it being a nightmare for platform and framework maintainers, as well. Rather than create a config or dependency DSL for every platform, why not just put the language to work for you?

> there's not much more you can accomplish with YAML or JSON compared to XML, even if some people find the syntax more palatable.

Sure, and vice versa.

I think there are arguments to be had for whether you want your config language to be "turing complete" (or in general capable of containing logic or just static data). I am not sure I am convinced.

But you seemed to be saying that XML was preferable to yaml for some reason related to turing completeness/logical power, which I'm not seeing. You can "shoehorn" conditions and loops into YAML or XML if you want (by defining a semantics on top of either one), and it's going to be cumbersome, yup.

I didn’t mean to imply that XML was preferable to YAML. I meant that neither is Turing Complete, so using either for dependencies and config is likely to be cumbersome. YAML looks nicer, and if you’re not using a decent IDE, you’re less likely to mess up with closing tags, etc., but that’s about it.