[linuxftw]

Markup languages are by their nature declarative. Take HTML, for example. You're providing a set of instructions for some other, smarter program to create some output based on your declarative input.

YAML is no different. You encode some configuration, something else makes it so.

Ansible kind of muddied things up because it looks like you're doing imperative things in YAML, but actually, you're doing declarative things and Ansible is interpreting your YAML in some particular way.