Some of this is truly on terraform. The for construct (and looping in general) was only added in TF 12, released in May 2019. Older codebases didn't have a real way to support looping so there's more copy paste there. TF supports ternary conditionals, but not true if statements, which makes adding more complicated if logic difficult.

The reality is that all programming languages have significant copy paste codebases using them, but there are features which help reduce the amount of it. Terraform is missing some of those features, and many of the features it does have were introduced in tf 12, which is less than a year old.

Yes. But Terraform (hcl) is not a programming language.

It’s interesting that some people bring up sbt as an example of how to use a „programming language” for configuration. The reason why sbt became dominant was the weight of Lightbend (Typesafe). There was no way to get away from it. Frankly, sbt can be awful mashup of copy / paste too. sbt is so much magic, I would not be surprised to discover that majority the folks who use sbt, have no actual clue why stuff works the way it works.

I haven’t tried Pulumi yet, I will try when I get the chance. I am eagerly waiting for an opportunity to use it. Hopefully it will surprise me in a positive way. Surely, it can deliver on what it promises. I have very fond memories of Chef and cookbooks in Ruby, it can be done.

Edit: personally, Chef solo (with right tooling to eliminate the server), was the best experience so far. If Pulumi can improve on that (no agent), I’m looking forward to take it for a test drive.

> I would risk to say that it’s not the Terraform that makes the people to copy / paste. It’s the people. Call it lack of knowledge, not enough time, laziness, tight schedules...

Well, the problem is that a majority of people don't want to / don't have the time to learn HCL, because it's not the most effective use of their time / not worth the "investment" to do so.

Learning HCL is not very rewarding, unless you are an ops person. Learning a general purpose language language like Python, TypeScript or whatever language your company uses is rewarding both for ops and dev people (or devops people if you like that term) and typically can be used for a much wider set of use-cases.

When introducing a new language the pros and cons of doing so should always be carefully considered, however unfortunately for devops tools new languages like HCL,Jsonnet,Starlark,zillions of YAML pseudo-programming DSLs etc. are often introduced very lightly, mentioning a handful of use cases where the new language shines, but ignoring the cons and intrinsic costs (learning curve, new tools, editor integrations, package manager etc. to be built).

Terraform works great for teams where you have a strict separation between ops and dev people. The ops people will spend their time learning HCL, the dev people will learn Python, TypeScript or whatever that is. However if you are trying to truly embrace a "DevOps" model Terraform shows its flaws. Developers will either still heavily rely on ops people to "help them" even for trivial infra changes or they will write sub-par copy pasta HCL code that tends to be verbose.

TF 0.12 may have a bunch of new constructs which make it easier to reduce duplication, but the boilerplate that is required to create an actual reuse module with variables and import it (and overall awkwardness of the module system/syntax compared to any other language) vs the simplicity of creating a reuse function/file in Python/TS is like night and day. Furthermore the subpar editor support for TF makes it actually hard to follow references between modules and safely refactor code, so there is a much lower threshold at which an abstraction appears "magic"/incomprehensible in HCL, compared to typed TS/Python where you can easily follow references.

Source: ~2 years worth of Terraform (incl. 0.12) and ~1 years worth of Pulumi use within multiple companies and teams.