#Craft

The Language That Wasn’t Supposed to Be One

If you hang around DevOps Twitter or Reddit long enough, you’ll stumble across a familiar fight: “Why does Terraform use HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) instead of a real programming language?” Half the crowd insists HCL is the perfect middle ground. The other half sees it as YAML’s slightly hipper cousin — still clunky, but with more curly braces. So, how did we end up with HCL at the center of infrastructure-as-code? And what would’ve happened if Terraform had just picked Python or Go instead?