[opinionator1]

You need to fix your mentality. HCL not being a complete language is a feature. Bash is a liability. If you honestly think you can build more reliable modern systems in bash, you deserve to be laughed right back into the 70s where you belong.

[reacharavindh]

Wow. It's a bit ironic to comment about fixing mentality while you're blatantly ignoring a rational argument with nothing.

I concur with the same statement. Newer domain specific syntaxes and tools are increasing the dependencies and cognitive load to get things done. One would have to remember the yaml syntax, and version specific keywords for Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible and everything in the container world just to deploy a statically linked Go binary. That's where we've come to now. It is worth pondering whether we are increasingly moving towards "give me the lego bricks, and I don't care to know what it specifically does" attitude, and if it's good or bad.

[laumars]

I rarely bother responding to troll accounts but I do feel the need to point a couple of things out:

1/ HCL not being a complete language is a burden when you're writing build scripts that need to target multiple environments (eg dev, UAT, staging, live) as it means you have to use the `count` syntax to include/exclude resources. Also I've frequently run into issues where output will expect a variable or resource to exist even when it's inside a ternary operator where the condition isn't met (isn't the point of an `if` condition that you don't evaluate all blocks of code in the structure?).

2/ The reason HCL isn't a "complete language" isn't because "complete languages" are a liability (clearly that's nonsense); it's because Hashicorp wanted something that met the middle ground between JSON and scripting so that all ranges of technical expertese were comfortable; and they wanted a format that could still be compiled back down to JSON. Personally I feel the monster they created is the worst of both worlds but I do think the goal they were trying to achieve is an honorable one.

3/ I was never trying to make the point that I've built more reliable systems in Bash. However once you start writing pretty complex Terraform projects (some of my build scripts are a several thousand lines of code; inc modules) you really do start to bang your head with Terraform - not all of it because of HCL though. Don't get me wrong, Terraform is definitely the best tool we have at the moment for deploying to "the cloud"; but that doesn't mean it isn't still bloody annoying to work with at times. A few bugs I've run into in the last month:

3a/ Error message wasn't being passed from AWS to the user so infra would fail to build but without explanation. A few hours of debugging and we discovered what resource was failing and why. This was a bug in Terraform so issue raised on Github.

3b/ Workspace name pushed the resource name tag over it's character limit. We did get an error message here but it was inaccurate. Thankfully this is an issue we've run into before so it was pretty quick to resolve.

3c/ The aforementioned problem of all code getting evaluated inside both conditions of a ternary operator

3d/ If your AWS token expires before the Terraform apply is complete you're left with incomplete infrastructure and no valid state file to rollback. This is particularly annoying if your builds do certificate management or ELK; both of which can take 15 to 20 minutes just on those resources alone.

3e/ You don't get line numbers nor even file names when errors are raised which makes debugging through large projects painful.

4/ I'm not about to sing the praises of Bash as a modern deployment tool as it can be a complete nightmare to work with if you're not proficient in it's hidden traps. But to answer your question; yes I have built reliable systems in Bash. It's a tool that has been around for decades, people can and have built some pretty reliable stuff in it and I personally consider myself a veteran. (for what it's worth I have nearly 3 decades of dev skills and have used a lot of other languages we might now consider "dangerous" - some of which are still used in production). As an aside note; it's the decades of years of experience in Bash and other, much lower level, languages that inspired me to write my own $SHELL and scripting language. So I tend to use that more than Bash these days.

5/ I didn't proof read this so apologies if some parts didn't make any sense. It's a long post and in replying to you I'm interrupting fixing one of those massive Terraform projects I described earlier.