HCL - why inventing another config/markup language? There TOML, yaml and dozen others.
I wasn't ever really a huge YAML fan. It's way too ambiguous and sensitive to whitespace. One erroneous space is way more likely to mess up your YAML file than your HCL file.
It's not perfect, but I actually would like to see MORE systems using HCL, not fewer.
In TOML you can indent but it's not required:
[[fruit]]
name = "apple"
[[fruit.physical]]
color = "red"
shape = "round"
fruit {
name = "apple"
physical {
color = "red"
shape = "round"
}
}
And doing so gives you such niceties as if-statements and loops (I mean, have you seen the straight nonsense people have to pull to make a simple 'if' in HCL?) as well as a seamless way to introduce external data sources. This is why Chef remains the only part of my workflow that has not changed over the last five years (and why first Puppet and, eventually, Ansible will fall by the wayside): because, as a programming language and set of libraries, I can bring it with me by extending it at the user level without having to extend the runtime to do something. Patching the runtime means I need CM for my CM; doing it at the user level means it goes with me and plays with the base tools.
I tend to write simple Jinja2 filters when I need something done quickly that's not included, and it's as simple as making a specifically named directory (filter_plugins) and a python class (FilterModule). You can write your own modules pretty simply as well but there's a bit more boilerplate.
So why is Terraform so popular instead of your tool? :)
Both approaches have tradeoffs, and what you've mentioned are clearly advantages of the full-PL config style. The problem with a full-blown programming language, though, is that the flexibility makes it more difficult to reason about effects without actually running the code. If you're just using it to generate a declarative data model that then gets applied, you're still doing fully declarative management, just with extra steps.
It's not _necessarily_ a good thing to have something like if conditionals in a provisioning system either - the goal with these systems is usually to reduce uncertainty about outcomes, not multiply the # of branches you need to reason about. Ultimately I agree Terraform has issues with restrictions of HCL, but I don't think I'd say choosing a programming language instead of a purely declarative style is a no-brainer.