[acdha]

> If you feel YAML is too complicated for you, a host of problems await for anything you want to do in infrastructure...

This is an uncharitable dismissal of a valid point. Think a bit more about the concern: is it that YAML is too hard or that it’s adding complexity in addition to that inherent to the work? You’re taking the domain-specific challenges of whatever you’re doing and adding YAML’s quirks like magic type conversion, various syntax oddities which just have to be memorized, requirement for a domain specific linter to validate things like macros, etc.; the various Ansible conventions for variable declaration and manipulation, programming language-like loops and conditionals, mix of raw Python and Jinja2 template syntax; the whole complex system for doing inventory and host/group variables; the various modules’ different implementation decisions for how they accept arguments and what they return; and the fact that those modules are wrapping other libraries which you can’t call directly (AWS adds something, wait for boto3 to add it, wait for Ansible to add it, find out that they forgot to add the optional feature you need, repeat). YAML is part of the concern and it especially adds wrinkles like needing dialect-specific editor / formatter / linter support to get the formatting and validation support which using a programming language would give out of the box but most of it comes back to using a document formatting language to write what inevitably needs to be code.

The counter-argument is that it’s easier to start with and that the high-level module interface avoids needing to write as much code. I think that’s a valid goal but it makes me wish there was an easier way to drop code into a project than writing a plugin: imagine if you hit a tricky place with the basic modules but could just drop a .py task in and have the richness of full Python with type validation telling you that an argument is incorrect before your deploy fails 10 minutes in.