YAML was a bad idea for CI pipelines

Remember how for decades we researched and iterated a million ways to make programming languages expressive and correct and built massive ecosystems of libraries, tooling, testing, type checking around them?

Then we throw that out and replace it with 1000 line dumb yamls when it comes to CI and cloud infrastructure in general.

The reasoning goes something like this:

Let's create a declarative spec that limits what we can do and promotes hermetic deterministic pipelines

but then you (we) realize we need to do programmy stuff, so:

Let's make it Turing complete but extremely awkward to express basic conditionals, control flows, parallelism, and dependencies

Look at the iteration of the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), one of the worst methods of expression to ever curse SREs. It's declarative but it's also imperative. It's the worst of all worlds. How does it work? No one knows.

YAML was a bad idea for CI pipelines in the same way that HCL was a bad idea for Terraform. CDK did it much better. (I can't believe I'm saying AWS tech is better than something).

Should have just used a real programming language.