[jesseryoung]

Programming languages will always be better, more feature rich and more capable than any DSL. However, the whole reason things like terraform or puppet become popular is because the people who write the DSL don't consider themselves "programmers" and they don't want to be thought of as "programmers".

As somebody who identifies as a "programmer" and often has to manage infrastructure I would absolutely love for a serious IaS library to pop up in my favorite language. I would switch to it immediately. However unless we start hammering home that if you are regularly writing in these DSLs that you are actually a programmer and there's nothing wrong with that people will still flock to these tools.

[systemvoltage]

Very much agree, I do wonder how can things like crontab be specified? The cron job syntax is its own fricking thing that I have to always look up. But then, I wonder, how else can it be specified? yaml file?

[eternityforest]

I've spent way too many hours this week looking for a better model for configurable timers than cron.

Cron is kind of awful, not just the syntax but the logic. You can't say "Every three days but not on Monday, if it would land on a Monday, defer that run till the next selected day".

There is also too many ways to say the same thing, so GUI editors are hard.

[systemvoltage]

Yeah, basically it needs to be Turing complete but it falls short. Then why not just give us Lua or some real programming language. There is no real need for a cryptic single line syntax.