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The block config syntax isn't that confusing. Nginx had it for years. this is the same as

    server {
        location / { 
          return 200 "OK"; 
        }
        location /error {
          return 404 "Error";
        }
    }
    server {
        location / {
          return 200 "OK";
        }
        location /error {
          return 404 "Error";
        }
    }
But because we know that nginx is a configuration language for a server where we define the behavior we want through creating a set of resources (servers in this example, but "example"s or "whut"s in yours)

    {
      "servers": [
        {
          "locations": [
            {
              "key": "/",
              "return": {
                 "status": 200,
                 "content": "OK"
               }
            },
            {
              "key": "/error",
              "return": {
                 "status": 404,
                 "content": "error"
              }
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "locations": [
            {
              "key": "/",
              "return": {
                 "status": 200,
                 "content": "OK"
               }
            },
            {
              "key": "/error",
              "return": {
                 "status": 404,
                 "content": "error"
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }


I am glad that you don't find the syntax confusing, but in my 25 years of monkeying with computer stuff, [] have been the canonical "I have a list of things" characters for a long as I can remember, so I sure am glad that Hashicorp decided that just repeating the key name is how one indicates list membership

I did see the "inspired by nginx" on hcl's readme, but that must be why you and Mitchell like hcl so much because I loathe nginx's config with all my heart


I was just saying HCL didn't invent block config. Perhaps nginx, Caddy, Lisp, F#'s Computation Expressions all primed me for HCL style syntax so it looks pretty clear to me. The key is understanding the value of that "repeating the key name", because it doesn't just become a keyname, it becomes a constructor and makes the syntax much simpler.

At the end of the day HCL isn't that much more complex than something like yaml. Saying "You don't want your developers learning yaml" is like saying "You don't want your developers learning Yaml. They send an email to the SRE guys, and the SRE guys are the Yaml experts"




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