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Comment by thanatos519 | Hacker News Reader

Amen! I found it excruciating that the language was always a few simple steps away from being homomorphic to JSON. I desperately needed to be able to manipulate it as data structures, not as strings. All of the ways I found to work around its limitations made me wish for something else entirely.

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Have you used it since they introduced HCL2? It supports other data structures much better than it used to. Maps, lists, sets, etc. are much easier to work with.

Still a far cry away from a proper programming language, which is what we need. For example, if you want to loop over some config and generate a resource for each config, but the resources need different providers (e.g., different AWS accounts) then you just can't do it. Further, if you just want a little function, you have to build a fully fledged module. Then there are the crazy namespaces (`var`, `local`, `resource`, `module`, etc).

Yes you can... assuming your config is a map, include a key for "provider", and set it appropriately. EG in your example for multiple AWS accounts, define providers aliased as `aws.account1`, `aws.account2`, and so on. Reference those provider aliases in your map you are iterating through, and set the provider to that value.

I'm 99% sure that will fail with an error because "provider" can't be set dynamically. See this issue, for example: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/24476

You can write Terraform using JSON if you want to: https://www.terraform.io/docs/language/syntax/json.html

Or do you mean something deeper?

I mean being able to reliably convert HCL↔JSON.

You can use JSON for your configuration: https://www.terraform.io/docs/language/syntax/json.html !

It's a language for a reason, there's a grammar, parser, lexer, ast. What's the problem?

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