Just use Terraform?

The value of CDK was always that it allowed you to write in a fully orthogonal language rather than the poor pseudo-language of hcl.

When writing stacks you need normal language features: loops, yes, but also if statements, reuse (functions), being able to do stuff like complex string parsing and re-formatting, etc etc.

HCL supports loops, modules can be kind-of used as functions with lots of footguns, there are awful hacks for some other things, and some stuff just couldn't be done.

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3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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cholantesh 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah I'm struggling to see the value here.

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stackskipton 3 days ago | parent [-]

The value for TFCDK was Developers don't have to learn another language, they can just continue to use existing language they already know.

Downsides are doing infrastructure in a programming language was always problematic unless developer was skilled at Ops which most who used TFCDK were not.

	▲	cholantesh 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I ought to have phrased it I guess as "I don't agree with the value proposition", mainly because of the downside you point out. This seems superior to Pulumi, though, in that the abstraction is (was) at least owned by Hashicorp so there was less likelihood of it falling out of date and giving you footguns.
	▲	coenhyde 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That might have been the promise but never the real value. As you say in practice the engineer needs to know ops & terraform along side their language of choice. The real value of cdktf was more dynamic infrastructure provisioning while still having the plan / apply pattern.