I wouldn't call it a schism; this sounds much too negative. They are different implementations of the same idea. Nix uses an external DSL, Guix an embedded DS

I wouldn't call it a schism; this sounds much too negative. They are different implementations of the same idea. Nix uses an external DSL, Guix an embedded DSL (using Guile Scheme for everything). The projects are not competing against one another. Problems that are solved to make software packageable in Nix benefit Guix and vice versa. As a Schemer and GNU person it was easy for me to pick Guix. I've been contributing to Guix for a few years now. I find the tooling of Guix to be more accessible and more hackable. In my experience when packaging Java for Guix it seems to me that Guix is a little more principled, where Nix would more readily accept binaries for bootstrapping (e.g. prebuilt jars). Considering how different functional package management is compared to the alternatives I think that novices could pick one or the other; once they are used to functional package management they can better make a decision to switch to another implementation. For bioinformatics software, though, Guix is far ahead. It's used at our bioinfo institute and in big projects like GeneNetwork.