[tokyodude]

This is my experience and it's clearly biased from maybe one bad example but ... Scons is an example of code over configuration and from what I could tell I never met someone that truly understood it. Because it was code over configuration every programmer added their own interpretation of what was supposed to happen, no programmer truly understood what was really going one and it turned into one giant mess of trying to understand different programmers hacks and code to get the build to work. I'm sure some Scons expert will tell me how I'm full of crap but I'm just saying, that's my experience.

So, what's my point? My point is configuration languages help in that they push "the one true way" and help to enforce it. Sure there are times you end up having to work around the one true way but given very powerful tools of a full language for configuration leads to chaos or at least that's my experience. Instead of being able to glance at the configuration and understand what's happening because it follows the one true way you instead end up with configuration language per programmer since every programmer will code up stuff a different way.