HCL

Raised as a usability problem by 10 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2017–2026), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with HCL, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 10 complaints

Removing one array element forces recreation of later resources, a hidden trap2026-08-24
Creating loops needs magic keywords; converting to JSON is a hack2025-10-14
Lacks proper iterators, forcing hacky workarounds like Terraform's count2025-09-23
Developers find HCL confusing and hard to read, with confusing error messages2025-06-19
The HCL editor extension is slow and buggy to use2024-11-07
HCL is described as absolutely painful to work with2024-05-16
Annoying edge-case issues and limitations make it intractable beyond simple use cases2022-12-19
Ternary branches evaluate even when the condition is unmet, causing errors on missing resources2018-05-15
HCL is awkward and unpleasant to write compared to a real programming language2018-01-27
Template language lacks loops and proper variables, making it hard to write configs2017-03-18