Hm, you got me thinking about reversible computing and how it could be applied to configuration.
Debugging a configuration becomes tedious once computation is involved. You think some value should be "foo" but it is "bar". Why is it "bar"? If someone wrote it there, the fix is simply to change. If "bar" is the result of some computation, you have to understand the algorithm and its inputs, which is significantly harder.
Interesting idea! Although, maybe you just want to be able to run the configuration language in a reversible debugger?
This issue becomes even harder when you have some kind of solver involved, like a constraint solver or unification. As a user the solver is supposed to make your life easier but if it rejects something without a good enough error message you are stuck; having to examine the solver code to work out why is a much worse experience than not having a solver. (This is the same issue with clever type systems that need a solver)
Debugging a configuration becomes tedious once computation is involved. You think some value should be "foo" but it is "bar". Why is it "bar"? If someone wrote it there, the fix is simply to change. If "bar" is the result of some computation, you have to understand the algorithm and its inputs, which is significantly harder.
Given a "reversible" programming language that might be easier. Such languages are weird though and I don't know much about them. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(time-reversible_computi...