[digitalsushi]

I struggle to understand why declarative tools are apparently so much more difficult to use than imperative. Why is it my team can, with great mediocrity, write a shell script, but cannot write a terraform or ansible to do the same?

Why is it they can follow a recipe to kind of make a mint birthday cake but they can't point at a picture of a cake on a picture menu and say "that one!"

Sometimes I think they don't actually know what they want before they start. And as the script evolves, like finger painting, they start to kind of like the blobs ...

But, I dont work at a software company. I just work at an enterprise with a large IT department.

[slushh]

>Why is it they can follow a recipe to kind of make a mint birthday cake but they can't point at a picture of a cake on a picture menu and say "that one!"

They point at the picture of the birthday cake, and they receive an apple pie and cannot figure out why. You have to read the documentation to understand that standing on one foot while pointing makes a difference.

Declarative tools are easier when you understand the domain. Otherwise, problems arise because small changes in the requirements can result in huge changes in the outcome.

[throwawaaarrgh]

> Why is it my team can, with great mediocrity, write a shell script, but cannot write a terraform or ansible to do the same?

They could. They just don't want to, because it's not as sexy as writing code. If you can't do it in Python, from scratch (lol with a lot of modules and very little exception handling), it's clearly inferior and a waste of time to learn. Their intent is to write code, not get things done!

They don't learn how to write shell scripts either. I'm sure they will go their entire lives without ever reading the man page. But will read a million bad blog posts about Python and take from them the worst conventions from mediocre programmers trying to get eyeballs on ads.