[cryptonector]

So, things need to be comprehensible by the humans that work with them. A 10x reduction in LoC / 10x increase in expressibility may or may not be a good thing, but if it captures intent better and with less ceremony and cruft, then it most decidedly is a FANTASTIC thing. Whereas a 10x LoC improvement that makes it harder to glean intent would be DISASTROUS.

Then again, code has to be run in order to analyze its output -- that or code has to be data you can analyze (like a Lisp), but that can be very difficult to reason about.

So my preference would be to have libraries for constructing configuration data. Then you can execute a program to generate the configuration, and that you can use without further ado. The output may not be easy for a human to understand, though it should be possible to write code to analyze it.