We typically try to avoid making subjective, boasty claims in our
documentation in recent times, but there remained both some older
documentation that we've not recently revised and also some newer examples
that are, in retrospect, also perhaps more "boasty" than they need to be.
We prefer not to use this sort of boasty language because not everyone
using Terraform has the same background and experience, and so what is
"easy" or "intuitive" to one person may not be so to another person, and
that should not suggest that the second person is in any way wrong or
inadequate.
In reviewing some of our use of the word "easy" here I tried as much as
possible to surgically revise the existing content without getting drawn
into a big rewrite, but in some cases the content was either pretty
unsalvageable (due to talking about obsolete features that were removed
long ago) or required some broader changes to make the result hopefully
still get the same facts across. In those cases I've both removed some
content entirely or adjusted larger paragraphs.
This was not an exhaustive review and so I'm sure there's still plenty of
room for similar improvements elsewhere. I also resisted the urge to
update some pages that contain outdated information about currently-active
features.
In earlier versions of Terraform the result of terraform state show was
in the pre-0.12 "flatmap" structure that was unable to reflect nested
data structures. That was fixed in Terraform 0.12, but as a consequence
this statement about the output being machine-parseable (which was
debateable even in older versions) is incorrect.
Fortunately, we now have "terraform show -json" to get output that is
intentionally machine-parseable, so we'll recommend to use that instead
here. The JSON output of that command is a superset of what's produced by
"terraform state show", so should be usable to meet any use-case that
might previously have been met by parsing the "terraform state show"
output.
We have released the v0.12-oriented content to the website early in order
to support the beta process, but in some places we neglected to explicitly
mark features or content as being v0.12-only.
Here we add explicit markers to the main cases we've seen where readers
have reported confusion, along with some other tweaks in similar vein.
Martin Atkins