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I love the Nix language and I generally distrust aesthetic feelings about programming languages. Neither SML nor Haskell are optimized for expressing deeply ne

by mbrock 9y ago

I love the Nix language and I generally distrust aesthetic feelings about programming languages. Neither SML nor Haskell are optimized for expressing deeply nested records with many string literals, for example. The multiline interpolated strings in Nix are extremely much better than in SML or Haskell. The way records and arrays are written is great: SML and Haskell both suffer from the tedious problem of using separators between items instead of after each one; in Nix each item can always be moved without messing with separators. I think Nix is an engineering marvel up to and including the language design. If you can make a better surface syntax and demonstrate it by translating some significant part of Nixpkgs, I'd be very interested, but I think in general the language is the way it is because that's what made most sense for the system's designers.

codemac 9y ago
> If you can make a better surface syntax ... http://gnu.org/s/guix http://gnu.org/s/guix Lisp is pretty good at lists. The only important language is the derivation language sent to the daemon. Nix spends so much time building up inputs... for shell scripts. I always felt like they would have been so much more successful if they chose some other, more popular language to generate derivation.
- mbrock 9y ago
  I dig Guix, but Lisp is also one of the most commonly reviled syntaxes, so it's hard to say it's clearly better, or that Nix would enjoy more adoption with S-expressions.
  - gkya 9y ago
    Most commonly and with lots ans lots of prejudice.
  - wcummings 9y ago
    Reviled by people who have never used it.
- jancsika 9y ago
  Is it possible to write a guix package that includes code which redefines the package object?
  - codemac 9y ago
    Yes! http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/emacs.scm#n215 http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/... You'll see here that the package emacs-minimal actually inherits from the emacs package definition, and then all fields afterwards are essentially overwrites of whatever was in the emacs package. Unfortunately, I just noticed that the manual alludes to this, but actually never explicitly documents it in the "Defining Packages" section :/
qznc 9y ago
So, JavaScript? The records literals are JSON, which is the most popular syntax for this at the moment anyways.
- mbrock 9y ago
  I tend to write JavaScript that looks a bit like Nix... but in general, the imperative constructs aren't suitable to the lazy evaluation strategy of Nix.
- cwp 9y ago
  No, Nix syntax is much nicer than Javascript. Consider, for example, the similarity between a let expression and an attribute set (NOT JSON by the way): let foo = 42; bar = "a string"; in { baz = "deja"; quux = "vu"; } Javascript: const foo = 42; const bar = "a string"; return { baz: "similar", quux: "but different" }; You find this kind of thing all over the place. Nix is a much smaller and simpler language syntactically, and more pleasant to write.
  - mbrock 9y ago
    Also, recursive definitions using "rec" which become nasty in JavaScript.
KirinDave 9y ago
> Neither SML nor Haskell are optimized for expressing deeply nested records with many string literals, for example. Purescript's extensible row types handle this process elegantly and if Nix takes a cue from that, it will work great.

by mbrock 9y ago

codemac 9y ago

> If you can make a better surface syntax ... http://gnu.org/s/guix http://gnu.org/s/guix Lisp is pretty good at lists. The only important language is the derivation language sent to the daemon. Nix spends so much time building up inputs... for shell scripts. I always felt like they would have been so much more successful if they chose some other, more popular language to generate derivation.

mbrock 9y ago
I dig Guix, but Lisp is also one of the most commonly reviled syntaxes, so it's hard to say it's clearly better, or that Nix would enjoy more adoption with S-expressions.
- gkya 9y ago
  Most commonly and with lots ans lots of prejudice.
- wcummings 9y ago
  Reviled by people who have never used it.
jancsika 9y ago
Is it possible to write a guix package that includes code which redefines the package object?
- codemac 9y ago
  Yes! http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/emacs.scm#n215 http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/... You'll see here that the package emacs-minimal actually inherits from the emacs package definition, and then all fields afterwards are essentially overwrites of whatever was in the emacs package. Unfortunately, I just noticed that the manual alludes to this, but actually never explicitly documents it in the "Defining Packages" section :/

qznc 9y ago

So, JavaScript? The records literals are JSON, which is the most popular syntax for this at the moment anyways.

mbrock 9y ago
I tend to write JavaScript that looks a bit like Nix... but in general, the imperative constructs aren't suitable to the lazy evaluation strategy of Nix.
cwp 9y ago
No, Nix syntax is much nicer than Javascript. Consider, for example, the similarity between a let expression and an attribute set (NOT JSON by the way): let foo = 42; bar = "a string"; in { baz = "deja"; quux = "vu"; } Javascript: const foo = 42; const bar = "a string"; return { baz: "similar", quux: "but different" }; You find this kind of thing all over the place. Nix is a much smaller and simpler language syntactically, and more pleasant to write.
- mbrock 9y ago
  Also, recursive definitions using "rec" which become nasty in JavaScript.

KirinDave 9y ago

> Neither SML nor Haskell are optimized for expressing deeply nested records with many string literals, for example. Purescript's extensible row types handle this process elegantly and if Nix takes a cue from that, it will work great.