So odd seeing all the HCL hate here. It's dead simple to read, much more so than YAML. It grew out of Mitchell's hatred for YAML. If your "developers" are having problems with HCL, it's likely a skills issue.
Yeah. I can't get the amount of hate seen here either. It's super natural to read and has very few concepts to learn. Just resources, lists, sets, dictionaries, variables, ternary operator, function calls and templates. Paired with a LSP and syntax highlighting it gets even easier to see the boundaries between code and variables. The two different ways to write dicts are a bit strange and foreach has some gotchas but honestly not a big deal. Especially not when put in comparison to YAML which has nothing even close and even more invisible footguns. Seeing comments like "it does not have if-statements". Duh, it's not imperative, for many good reasons. Not understanding that yeah it's clearly a skills issue.
You can be declarative and still have imperative constructs hidden behind pure functions let's say. That's how Ansible does it - it is super useful to define a custom filter that's called like "{{ myvariable | my_filter }}" but underneath there is a bunch of imperative Python datastructure wrangling (without visible side effects, of course - just in memory stuff), with arbitrary code. Doing the same in HCL is I believe impossible in general case.
