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by pxc 193 days ago
Declarative vs. imperative doesn't have anything to do with power or expressiveness. Some general purpose programming languages are declarative, and some declarative DSLs are Turing-complete.

I worry that comments like this lead the average newbie to overlook (or worse, avoid) declarative languages (both among DSLs and among general-purpose languages) because they will associate the term with hacky, confining, gotcha-ridden messes like Terraform's HCL, Azure DevOps' standards-breaking "YAML" DSL, etc.

Incidentally I agree that a language like Python is a terrible fit for this domain, but it's also plain to see that HCL is a shitty tarpit. It's not hard to understand why people want to get away from HCL.

And concretely, you can use Pulumi in a pure functional style with F# or Scala.