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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

The Terraform CDK is Terraform for people who hate HCL. I really can't fathom why people lock themselves into HCL when you could be using Python.

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It's a polyglot world for IAC, and even standing before both tools in their current state I can imagine other axes of consideration that might rank as highly as the specific characteristics of the language. In our case we adopted TF several years back and being able to use a different language probably isn't going to be enough benefit to justify migrating all our things. I think in many cases people will adopt the tool that gives them the most confidence that it will do what they need, and deal with whatever language it uses.

CDKTF is very painful! I am using it with Go on a pilot and HCL feels so much comfy and easier to read!

I can agree that for basic stuff HCL cuts a little more to the core because you don’t have the programming language boilerplate around it but to me it reads the same except things like conditional and loops are a lot more natural.

Just being able to DRY your code and write tests is already worth the cost of admission for me.

It can't be DRY and modular with CDKTF though - you can't really put components into Go modules, for example, so, you still get a monolithic codebase unless you use Go as glue code and put all the IaC in Terraform modules. I think Pulumi is better in that regard and those who don't want to use a programming language can use the new Pulumi YAML.

I do use CDKTF where Terraform lacks: dynamic providers and dynamic resource names. For anything else, modular Terraform code does that and does it better, and it's more readable and works with the existing Terraform ecosystem of Terraform Cloud, linters, security scanners, drift detectors, etc.

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