This is so true, I have seen it happen with so many projects. It always starts with a cute declarative DSL, and inevitably imperative / flow control structures emerge, at which point you wonder why they didn't use a real programming language in the first place and save you the hassle or learning a half baked imperative DSL.

- Puppet

- CMake

- Terraform

- ...

All these started with pure declarative DSL then incrementally created a nightmarish imperative monstrosity.

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spooky_deep 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

CMake was never declarative AFAIK?

CMake today is effectively an eso-lang / Turing tarpit with some “modern” declarative conventions that people try to push.

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Derbasti 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

- Visual Studio project files are XML files that are interpreted line by line, and can contain variables, branches, and loops. Hell on earth.

	▲	spooky_deep 15 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Horrible. Would’ve been much nicer if they’d reached for Scheme.
	▲	Xelbair an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		what's even worse that schema uses extremely generic types with attributes denoting actual type. Makes reading it even harder, and any possible constraints due to type safety go out of the window, so we get worst of both worlds.