i’ll be honest, that article makes it sound like the creators of CUE are really just taking their interest in type theory and applying it wholesale to devops configuration. maybe it’s just late but my eyes were glazing over by the third lattice diagram that really made no sense to me. you seem really into it so i’m sure there’s a reason and i’d like to know what makes it cool, but in more accessible terms like maybe what it lets me do that i couldn’t do in another language. got any links like that?

I have a website I maintain, many people tell me it has helped them

https://cuetorials.com

I've built a monorepo software catalog that solves a number of the complexities in CI, manage most k8s/helm resources with CUE, and built a code gen framework on top of CUE

https://docs.hofstadter.io

To me, I think want sold me was being able to build up large config values from pieces and pattern constraints, know that the system will ensure correctness, and being able to easily inspect that config. Being able to combine CUE with yaml or json in a single CLI call is super handy and helped me when advocating for adoption. You can use CUE to validate existing config or layer a bit on top before having to convince people to change their toolset

That CUE is a logical language makes the learning curve a bit stepper than most other config languages. I've kept it simple for the devs I serve and being a JSON superset makes their modifications to my code an easy ask/lift

I also generate HCL JSON from CUE too, since the OP is about HCL

i’ll check those links out —thanks for taking the time to write up your thoughts!