> My experience has been that most of the people configuring these systems don’t know how to code, and configuration languages is their gateway
I don't really disagree but this is such a pessimistic, NIH-syndrome viewpoint. Feel free to look at the code for any of the major Terraform providers. There's a lot of production-hardened, battle-tested Go code that's dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the different cloud APIs. They are an incredibly deep abstraction. Terraform also implicitly builds a DAG to run operations in the right order. Comparing writing HCL to writing straight Go code with the AWS SDK, the HCL code has something like an order of magnitude fewer lines of code. It absolutely makes sense to use Terraform / HCL instead of writing straight Go code.
Yeah, don’t really understand the sentiment here. I’ve been programming for 20 years and actively use Terraform and CUE at work. I actually write a lot of Go code for our platform, but I’ve never once thought it’d be a good idea to just start calling APIs directly.
I don't really disagree but this is such a pessimistic, NIH-syndrome viewpoint. Feel free to look at the code for any of the major Terraform providers. There's a lot of production-hardened, battle-tested Go code that's dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the different cloud APIs. They are an incredibly deep abstraction. Terraform also implicitly builds a DAG to run operations in the right order. Comparing writing HCL to writing straight Go code with the AWS SDK, the HCL code has something like an order of magnitude fewer lines of code. It absolutely makes sense to use Terraform / HCL instead of writing straight Go code.