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Me too, though nix (https://nixos.org) and eventually nickel (https://nickel-lang.org) get you very close today.

Not exactly that, but definitely take a look: https://dhall-lang.org/

I wish Ansible just had better data handling. Adding variable assignment plays and jamming things in Jinja is pretty clunky (if you want to, say, pull some data from a REST API and loop over a subset of the info)

You could always make an Ansible module but then there's the overhead to managing/installing that

Data wrangling can also make idempotent playbooks a bit clunky, too. You get into this 2-4 play "run check, reshape results, conditionally run play" pattern