> This is not structured data. This is programming masquerading as configuration
I find myself expressing this same opinion to people on a frequent basis. See ansible for another big example. Ansible has a try/catch equivalent in yaml [0]!
Unfortunately, YAML is more or less a lowest common denominator for these sorts of interactions - being usable from any language is a really big boon. Would love to see the world adopt a trivial lisp or similar for this sort of thing, but that feels a ways off.
Helm 3 introducing lua, for example, is a big step forward. Pretty much exactly what I've been envisioning for making k8s deployments less crummy, so I hope they end up with a good product. [1] Helm 2 is using Go-templated YAML, and it's terribly unergonomic and not particularly maintainable. Until you run templating, it's not even valid yaml, so text editors are terribly useless in aiding you with linting.
[0]: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks...
https://github.com/lightbend/config
It adds includes/inheritance, substitutions, unit of measure parity , comments , and few other things -- on top of JSON.
does not have if-logic, loops, or arbitrary functions, however.
On plus side, the library is available in a number of languages, easily embeddable. And there is an IntelliJ plugin for it, to color the syntax of the config files.