GitHub actions would suck whatever you "configured" them in, because you are trying to describe a program in a data structure.
Ansible makes the same mistake, as do countless other tools.
Ansible makes the same mistake, as do countless other tools.
(cries in lisp)
But in doing so, we've thrown out the other important part of lisp, which is that you can use the same syntax for data that you do for control flow. And so we're stuck in this world where a "modern-looking" program is seen as a thing that must be evaluated to make sense, not a data structure in and of itself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1pyg07/why_not_use_in... is a fascinating 10 year old discussion. And of course, there's Smalltalk, which guided others to a treasure it could not possess. But most younger programmers have never even had these conversations.
Non-lisp languages have parentheses, brackets and braces, using indentation to clarify the structure. Nobody can reasonably work with minified Javascript, without reformatting it first to span multiple lines, with indentation.
Lisp has great support for indentation; reformatting Lisp nicely, though not entirely trivial, is easier than other languages.
Oh, have you seen parinfer? It's an editing mode that infers indentation from nesting, and nesting from indentation (both directions) in real-time. It also infers closing parentheses. You can just delete lines and it reshuffles the closers.
The github.io site has animations:
LISP seems great for tinkerers and researchers, but not so much corporate devs who want extreme amounts of consistency and predictability, but don't need the absolute most elegant solution.
Even Lisp software that uses Lisp for configuration does not necessarily allow programming in that configuration notation.
Since this article is about helm, I'll point out that Go templates are very lispy. I often have things in them that look like {{ and (foo bar) (bar baz) }} and it only gets crazier as you add more parentheses ;)
The problem I have with infra-as-code tools is that what I really want is a pretty simple representation for "the state of the world" that some reconciliation can use, and then I want to generate that stuff in a typesafe, expression-based language like TypeScript or Python (Dhall exists, but its Haskell-like syntax and conventions are too steep a learning curve to get mainstream adoption). Instead we get CloudFormation and Terraform which shoehorn programming language constructs into a configuration language (which isn't strictly an objection to code-as-data generally) or things like Helm which uses text templates to generate a "state of the world" description or these CDKs which all seem to depend on a full JavaScript engine for reasons that don't make sense to me (why do I need JavaScript to generate configuration?).
This describes 100% of software development, though! Programming is just designing data structures that represent some computation. Each language lends itself better to some computations than to others (and some, like YAML, are terrible for describing any kind of computation at all), but they're all just data structures describing programs.
The problem isn't that GitHub Actions tries to describe a program in a data structure, the problem is that the language that they chose to represent those programs (YAML and the meta language on top) is ill-suited to the task.
My favorite example of this is chown/chmod taking 4-5 lines, in yaml. Sure you can do it a bunch of different ways, sure it allows for repeatable commands. But, it just sucks.