Yeah. I don’t understand why we keep submitting ourselves to this way of working.

Most of that is the embedded templating/scripting system (the stuff between {{}}), not YAML itself.

Well, that's Jinja. And arguably not a bad tool, but not the best for the use-case of config-management.

Yeah, I just have this sentiment wishing that Ansible's author used own-crafted format. HashiCorp used their own and suddenly in this case no one says "yaml should be everywhere because it's everywhere already".

In a similar mood, I wished Kubernetes was staying every from yaml. Even mentioned HCL would be better (although it's not perfect)

Yes but the task names and parameters try to mimic natural language, like assert: that:, so you're supposed to read it as a whole, and it quickly turns into an abomination, with one syntax (yaml) for the structure and another (jinja) for values and conditions

IMHO, the issue is that Ansible uses YAML to do "programming language" sorts of things, which is why it feels so unnatural.

I tried an experiment last year: What if Ansible had Python rather than YAML syntax. https://github.com/linsomniac/uplaybook?tab=readme-ov-file#s...

The downside is that having full Python available makes it really easy to make your playbooks non-idempotent, which Ansible gate-keeps behind Ansible modules. Also someone raised a concern that full Python (rather than a more limited safe dialect like Starlark) would make it harder to trust third-party playbooks. But considering uPlaybook's use case (ansible-like system configuration) it feels like even with a restricted dialect it is going to have plenty of opportunity for nefarious purposes.

I've put out uPlaybook for some limited review among my friends, and I've gotten some excitement about it. It doesn't have fleet management and remote running though, which is the big negative feedback I've gotten. I'm interested in thoughts on it though.