Formalising Configuration Languages: Why is this Important in Practice?

Formalising configuration languages sounds rather academic why is this important in practice? Almost all large installations including critical systems such as air traffic control[4] now rely very heavily on configuration tools, and their associated languages, to define and manage their infrastructure. This growth means that configuration errors are becoming more serious, and more prevalent: they were found to be the second major cause of service-level failures in one of Google’s main services[3], and they have been responsible for serious outages at most of the main internet service providers. Unlike modern programming languages, configuration languages are usually defined by a single implementation, with no formal specification of the language ambiguities and implementation errors are much more likely, and it is hard to create alternative compilers or other tools.