As for logic, to me, it's important that the language remain a data format and be parseable and auditable, i.e. "human readable for non programmers".
We had one manager describe it as "automation even a manager can understand". I'm a developer, but I'm jaded about software development, and I definitely agree with the approach Ansible (and Puppet) take about describing infrastructure with a model, rather than making it a program. I'm not really even trying to make it turing complete, I want to create a language that allows modelling how you want to describe the datacenter, but it's not trying to be a programming language. In fact, I'm rebelling against it trying.
There's a difference to a developer vs sysadmin mindset, but as something in between, I want to write applications code when I'm writing code, rather than writing infrastructure automation code. Code should be minimized, and that makes things more reliable in the long run, and enforces consistency IMHO.
I'm a little unclear about what you say about putting host specific information in Ansible roles. Pretty sure you can't do that, but I may be misunderstanding the question :)
About the second point (host specific information in Ansible roles): I was referring to this: http://www.ansibleworks.com/docs/playbooks.html#roles -- I was (incorrectly) under the assumption that you could put host file variable overrides (as you would in host_vars) under the vars/ section, but it looks like that's more of a generic, non-host, non-group specific variable directory? I have edited my comment and removed the incorrect section.
We had one manager describe it as "automation even a manager can understand". I'm a developer, but I'm jaded about software development, and I definitely agree with the approach Ansible (and Puppet) take about describing infrastructure with a model, rather than making it a program. I'm not really even trying to make it turing complete, I want to create a language that allows modelling how you want to describe the datacenter, but it's not trying to be a programming language. In fact, I'm rebelling against it trying.
There's a difference to a developer vs sysadmin mindset, but as something in between, I want to write applications code when I'm writing code, rather than writing infrastructure automation code. Code should be minimized, and that makes things more reliable in the long run, and enforces consistency IMHO.
I'm a little unclear about what you say about putting host specific information in Ansible roles. Pretty sure you can't do that, but I may be misunderstanding the question :)