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But then I had to use the Nix language. And that was a great displeasure, and I ended giving up NixOS all together because of this one pain point. Could you ar

But then I had to use the Nix language. And that was a great displeasure, and I ended giving up NixOS all together because of this one pain point. Could you articulate why? I have only been using Nix for ~3 months, but so far I do not really have qualms with the Nix language. Maybe it is because I have written a fair bit of Haskell before. (Of course, I understand the argument that it would have been more comfortable if an existing language like Scheme was used.) My biggest concern for Guix is that they will restrict the available packages by being overly zealous a bout package-licensing (like everything the FSF does). Same here. When I got interested in NixOS/GuixSD I seriously considered using GuixSD, because Scheme is more familiar. But there are just some proprietary packages that I need for work (Skype) and at home. I didn't really feel like having to rely on third-party repositories, etc.

josteink 8y ago
> Could you articulate why? I have only been using Nix for ~3 months, but so far I do not really have qualms with the Nix language. I mean... It's not a "real" language in the sense that there exists any tooling, debuggers, unit-test suites or anything. You write your recipes and try to see if they work. And when they don't you have no idea why. With a real programming language (like Scheme) I could evaluate something working, compare it to my non-working stuff and probably figure out where it all went wrong. Chances are I could probably expand the macros and debug my way to a solution right within Emacs without ever launching a single external tool. There's just this huge gap between what you get and what you expect. And with Nix being a one-tricky pony, there's almost zero incentives for the community at large to try bridge that gap.
- deleted 8y ago
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- binaryphile 8y ago
  I found the nix-repl to be very helpful in this situation...you can also invoke command-line expressions directly with nix but it's a bit more arcane.

josteink 8y ago

> Could you articulate why? I have only been using Nix for ~3 months, but so far I do not really have qualms with the Nix language. I mean... It's not a "real" language in the sense that there exists any tooling, debuggers, unit-test suites or anything. You write your recipes and try to see if they work. And when they don't you have no idea why. With a real programming language (like Scheme) I could evaluate something working, compare it to my non-working stuff and probably figure out where it all went wrong. Chances are I could probably expand the macros and debug my way to a solution right within Emacs without ever launching a single external tool. There's just this huge gap between what you get and what you expect. And with Nix being a one-tricky pony, there's almost zero incentives for the community at large to try bridge that gap.

deleted 8y ago
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binaryphile 8y ago
I found the nix-repl to be very helpful in this situation...you can also invoke command-line expressions directly with nix but it's a bit more arcane.