[garethrowlands]

Terraform is good overall but HCL just isn't a very good language.

Given that its main purpose is to describe objects of various types, its facilities for describing types are pretty weak and its facilities for describing data are oddly inconsistent. Its features for loops and conditionals are weak and ad-hoc compared with a regular programming language. Identifier scope / imports are a disaster and defining a function is woeful.

Some of this is influenced by Terraform's problem domain but most of it isn't required by that (if it was required, people wouldn't have such an easy time doing their Terraform in python/go/rust).

Despite this, Terraform is overall good. But there's a reason there's a small industry of alternatives to HCL.