Comment by cassianoleal

> That seems to be everyone's initial goal, but then it inevitably gets leaky.

This is very much true. And until they do get leaky, you have to wrap them in all sorts of weird templates or other forms of abstraction.

This is one of the reasons I used to really like Chef's config language. It was a Ruby DSL, which meant that anything the DSL couldn't do natively, you could just use Ruby right there.

Of course, this is easily misused, but if you were careful it was as powerful as it was elegant.