[cyberpunk]

I don't know a single person who prefers HCL over literally anything else, but still, it's a happy day for them so I won't air my entitled little complaints and instead say: thank you hashicorp!

You made life as a cloud infra beard better for a while, and I wish you all success going onwards.

[dan_quixote]

I've come full circle on this and actually like HCL now. It's so limiting that there's often only one (or a few at most) way to feasibly do something. This is kinda painful when your team is small, but becomes a net-positive in a larger team.

[acdha]

I definitely have hit a few pain-points but I share your view. JSON/YAML are too primitive (and YAML's treacherous magic behaviours are downright hazardous) but a general-purpose programming language gives a lot of room to make hard-to-understand or non-deterministic code.

I've gotten a ton of value out of Fabric (this is in no way a criticism of Jeff's great work) but I've seen multiple projects where people took at advantage of everything they could do in Python and made a deployment system which is as much of a project to maintain as the code it deployed. There are only so many teams disciplined enough to avoid that and I think the declarative approach avoids many of those pitfalls, critically dependent on providing a sufficiently rich set of abstractions.

[anothernewdude]

The real pain comes from when there's zero ways to do a thing.

I'm tired of config languages. Just be a library.

[verdverm]

cue export --out json | tf apply

This is now my preferred method

[zenlikethat]

Huge HCL fan here. It basically fixed all my gripes with other configuration languages. Not too heavy, not too light and I love auto-hclfmt. I'm a bit sad it was so unpopular, and e.g., abandoned for Github Actions in favor of YAML.

[Galanwe]

HCL is the reason I moved from terraform to pulumi+terraform backend.

[staticassertion]

HCL is a hell of a lot better than YAML, so I'll take it.

[patrick451]

HCL is bizarre, but I'd take it over writing configuration in yaml or json any day.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I like HCL vs JSON for Packer, mostly by virtue of supporting comments.

[alexfrydl]

The only thing I don't like about HCL is that there are not enough good libraries for me to use it as the configuration language in all of my projects. I love HCL.

HCL 2 anyway.

[darthrupert]

I prefer HCL over everything else that's currently in use. Especially over YAML.

[dkdk8283]

Way better than CDK.

[Galanwe]

CF < CDK < HCL < Pulumi

[harpratap]

What's CF? Cloud Foundry?

[dpayonk]

Cloud formation