> Well, then maybe you should try it before you decide it doesn't work!

Based on the assumptions I called out about it, it necessarily can't work as well as a general purpose language. I intend to try it to see if my assumptions are correct or not.

> It's a nice idea to be able to have a programming language you're familiar with available to do infra work, but deploying and managing infrastructure is a totally different problem domain than writing an application.

It's not a hard domain. Developers can write a program that evaluates to YAML--it's not hard. The hard part is applying that YAML to the infrastructure in an efficient way, but programmers don't need to worry about this because Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubectl, etc do it for them.

> If the concern is letting developers that don't have much ops experience architect an infrastructure, or you have recent graduates that "don't know HCL", then you have quite a higher learning curve than you actually think you do.

"Learn Ops + HCL" is a bigger learning curve than "learn ops". Notably, learning two things at the same time is a bigger problem than learning them both individually. But you're right that using a standard programming language isn't a substitute for learning how to architect infrastructure--I never said it did--only that it removes the unnecessary complexity and unfamiliarity imposed by HCL.

> I've never once thought "I really wish I could just use TypeScript for configuring my infrastructure". If that's you, great! Call me when you hit scale and your ops team needs to refactor it.

Ha! If the industry hasn't moved past Terraform in 5 years time, it will only be because HCL has adopted enough of the general purpose programming language featureset as to remain competitive. That's certainly its trajectory.

"It's not a hard domain."

Are you really arguing that deploying and managing infrastructure is not a hard domain? Please. The very existence of tools trying to solve these problems speaks to this difficulty.

I'm going to drop it at this point because it's starting to feel like you're either trolling or have never run a substantial application in production before.

It seems like you’re violently agreeing with me. Like I said, rectifying the infrastructure is the hard part and generating YAML is not. Let the tools do the hard part. They’re good at that. Not so much at the expressiveness and reusability part.

> Ha! If the industry hasn't moved past Terraform in 5 years time, it will only be because HCL has adopted enough of the general purpose programming language featureset as to remain competitive. That's certainly its trajectory.

Quite a statement to make for somebody who has never used Terraform.

I've been keeping tabs on it for a while. Feel free to point out where I'm mistaken.

Yeah, I meant that Terraform is more rigid with respect to reusability than a general purpose language like Python. This isn't a controversial point; the controversy is whether that's a bug or a feature. I think it's a feature, and to the extent that Terraform is becoming increasingly flexible, I would say I'm vindicated in my position.

I think the person above is mostly pointing out about dynamic blocks , since that do allow abstracting blocks of config and also allow subtle differences