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With Puppet 4, Puppet is lightyears ahead of the mess that is HCL. It's not a general-purpose language, but it's strongly typed and you can work with datastruct

With Puppet 4, Puppet is lightyears ahead of the mess that is HCL. It's not a general-purpose language, but it's strongly typed and you can work with datastructures in a functional fashion. I'll admit that some more complicated transformations are less natural than I'd like, but at least they're possible. If I could use puppet to manage openstack instances at work, I'd use it over Terraform in a heartbeat because the foundation is much more solid, but unfortunately such a provider does not exist. I use terraform and want to like it, but every bug and weird behaviour and nonsensical limitation is making it harder and harder. Furthermore, these aren't really fixable implementation issues. The terraform language needs a complete redesign. You don't need explicit loops and branching to do the kind of declarative programming terraform needs, but being able to use basic datastructures besides strings would be very useful.

devonkim 10y ago
Terraform has lists and maps, which takes care of a number of use cases at least. Now, if you want types as opposed to data structures then you start to get into structures that are tough to serialize into JSON that is helpful for interoperability with even less featureful languages / DSLs. Instead of if statements, pattern matching constructs would probably suffice for avoiding some of the concerns with avoiding loops and branching (limits and predictability upon the DAG and resulting state machine being generated as I understand it). In any case, I've found plenty of power by using custom data providers that use whatever logic I want and feed that to Terraform providers and modules to instantiate. I think the level of maturity with the Terraform community is still in the early stages and emphasis will shift to data provider based constructs for orchestration.

devonkim 10y ago

Terraform has lists and maps, which takes care of a number of use cases at least. Now, if you want types as opposed to data structures then you start to get into structures that are tough to serialize into JSON that is helpful for interoperability with even less featureful languages / DSLs. Instead of if statements, pattern matching constructs would probably suffice for avoiding some of the concerns with avoiding loops and branching (limits and predictability upon the DAG and resulting state machine being generated as I understand it). In any case, I've found plenty of power by using custom data providers that use whatever logic I want and feed that to Terraform providers and modules to instantiate. I think the level of maturity with the Terraform community is still in the early stages and emphasis will shift to data provider based constructs for orchestration.