HCL

The Terraform configuration language (HCL) is unintuitive compared to standard programming languages. Concepts like conditional logic, looping with for_each, and mapping collections are unnecessarily cumbersome. Few developers have deep Terraform experience, slowing team onboarding.

Terraform's merge() function only performs shallow merging, not deep merging of nested maps and objects. This prevents clean composition of default configurations with user-supplied overrides and makes merging multi-level data structures awkward.