It's yet another semi-json format that doesn't have widespread support by any other parsers. Even Hashicorp recommends JSON if you want something that is machine readable.
I think it looks lovely :- ) having used Puppet a bit in the past. Look how simple: `inline = ["sudo apt-get -y update", ... install nginx ...` Terraform seems to be. .... hmm, apparently one can use things like Chef & Puppet etc together with Terraform, I eventually noticed.