Turing Complete Configuration

• more extensible
• tend to be heavier
• harder to provide detailed error messages
• more difficult for new users

Data Based Configuration

• easier to use
• easier to provide documentation
• lighter to embed
• more limited usecases

For stuff like, say, configuring all of your systems and programs in one file, actual programming languages are really useful. coughnixcough

I've become addicted to script-configured window managers. I won't even try ones that aren't, anymore.

Bash is a scripting language, so it qualifies per your description, but the main advantage is that anything you can do in the config, you can do on the CLI: these WMs also have first-class CLI tooling, a consequence of CLI-first design. All configuration is runtime adaptable, and although auto config reloading can get you there, it's fantastic to be able to change a configuration without it having to be persisted in a file.

Seriously, next to tiling, scripted configuration is the most important feature of a WM. I haven't encountered it outside of WMs very often, but for long running processes, it's a great design.

Apart from text editors/IDEs I don't really see the use for it. I think it is not practical unless all your users are both power users and programmers, which basically boils down to developer tools.

scriptable configuration makes sense if you want to be able to extend or modify the program like with vim while data based configuration makes sense if your program is already extendable/configurable enough like with i3

I think the primary difference is that data based configuration is easier for software to modify and store.

I think data configuration is fine until you get to a point where you need functions. This is one of my pet peeves: data configuration formats that get creative to work around the format limitation when they should switch to scripting. My example is Home Assistant.

Home Assistant is a home/smart device automation server. It uses Yaml for automation scripts. But you often need functions. So they use jinja2 templates to emulate functions in Yaml. Then you have to manage copying variable values to make them available in the runtime context who where jinja2 templates are evaluated. There is no static validation for templates. And it takes a lot of detective work to figure out what variables and helpers are available. It's very frustrating. I really wish Home Assistant would use a type-checked scripting language instead. And it's not the only system out there that uses Yaml with string templates!

You can also get the best of both worlds: https://cuelang.org/

it’s not just a json config file, it’s a schema that can be used to validate its input, and a library to load, validate based on said schema, and convert to-in memory representation with no extra code.

As long as it's not configured by GUI I'm grateful 🙏😔