> I can’t trust my teammates to write code that doesn’t use raw eval()’s all over the place. Getting them, nevermind relying on them to write Python/JS in the correct way is straight up out of the question.
> At least I know in Terraform/HCL they can’t map a config change over the 1000 new instances they spun up because they happened to write their for loop wrong.
To be clear, the proposal is to use a programming language to generate your HCL-equivalent configs, not to imperatively modify infrastructure. Consequently, you can inspect the generated "HCL" (or whatever the output is) and make sure it looks like the code they would write manually. Further, you can even write automated tests.
Then use Starlark (https://go.starlark.net) or Dhall or similar.
> At least I know in Terraform/HCL they can’t map a config change over the 1000 new instances they spun up because they happened to write their for loop wrong.
To be clear, the proposal is to use a programming language to generate your HCL-equivalent configs, not to imperatively modify infrastructure. Consequently, you can inspect the generated "HCL" (or whatever the output is) and make sure it looks like the code they would write manually. Further, you can even write automated tests.