No, but using a 'real' programming language doesn't force you to write in a declarative style unless you use something like a pure functional language and before you know it people would start making a mess in their playbooks using the whole power of Python. Ansible is awesome for devops precisely because it restricts what you can do and forces you to try to do things in a consistent declarative (and hence idempotent) style, which is important to devops.
This could have been solved by choosing a language like lua and restricting the runtime environment - which is what is done in game software. Lua also has a tight, efficient interpreter. Making a mini-programming language in YAML is _coding horror_.
