In that case you might want to look at ansible: it does exactly what such a system should (logs in with SSH and runs some scripts) but does in a smart way (eg. you can configure certain boxes to be web servers and have it run a script on all web server boxes). It does have some weird config format but it does also allow you to run scripts.
Quite curious about if whether we had more robust shell languages, like Inferno's es, which uses functional expressions, though it's some 20+ years old by now, if kept alive by some enthusiasts... would much of the rationale behind the more basic configuration management and provisioning go away?
The chief rationale for embarking on the CM route is idempotence. Though it seems to me having a basic, lexer-only language simply for chain loading commands to exec() without much of the state and environment baggage behind full command shells could work as an alternative. execline works like this: http://skarnet.org/software/execline/
I've used Ansible, and of the systems I've used to solve this and similar problems (Chef, Docker, Puppet) Ansible has been the cleanest, most well-thought-out, and easiest to use. But ultimately it's included in my review of the above tools. It misses 10% of cases instead of 50%, but I still end up spending an inordinate amount of time working around the system instead of running it.
