[verdverm]

I'm aware of the SDKs, but we don't want them because they are an imperative interface, no matter how you want to spin it as "declarative". I have access to all the imperative constructs in the underlying language and can create conditional execution without restriction.

Even if I use the Yaml compiler for CUE (which we did) I still have to write `fn::` strings as keys, which is ugly and not the direction our industry should go. Let's stop putting imperative constructs into string, let's use a better language for configuration, something purpose built, not an SDK in an imperative language. These "fn::" strings are just bringing imperative constructs back into what could have been an actual declarative interface. Note, Pulumi is not alone here, there are lots of people hacking Yaml because they don't know what else there is to do. CEL making it's way to k8s is another specific example.

This cannot be the state-of-art in ops, we can do much better, but I get that Pulumi is trying to reach a different set of users than devops and will end up with different choices and tradeoffs

(I maintain https://cuetorials.com and am very active in the CUE community)