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I am of a similar opinion, but I think it's largely due to my typical use case. If you use Nix in a "drive-by" kind of way, it's very hard to make any inroads

I am of a similar opinion, but I think it's largely due to my typical use case. If you use Nix in a "drive-by" kind of way, it's very hard to make any inroads into the language. The documentation and tutorials are not really intended for a casual user - it is expected you will sit down with the Nix site like a good book, and go at it from start to finish. If (like me) you instead touch Nix little and often, doing small invocations or on-the-fly editing, the docs are much less useful. There's also no way to understand it in terms of a few simple concepts for beginners. Do you want an override, an overlay, a flake, or something else? Does specifying an option in multiple places combine them, or does one spec override the other? It feels as though Nix is a technology of special cases, and the docs don't make it easy to understand what to do in each case when all you know is the kind of change you want to make. The worst culprit of this is NixOS services, which each declare an ad-hoc API that I normally find myself digging into the service declaration file in the Nix repo to try and understand.

oblio 6y ago
> If you use Nix in a "drive-by" kind of way, it's very hard to make any inroads into the language. The documentation and tutorials are not really intended for a casual user - it is expected you will sit down with the Nix site like a good book, and go at it from start to finish. If (like me) you instead touch Nix little and often, doing small invocations or on-the-fly editing, the docs are much less useful. This is super serious, major, I hope the devs are paying attention. Most users of anything are drive-by, rather casual users. Think of any big tech out there: they became popular precisely because they were easy to get started (at least back when they were launched/became popular): C, Unix, Bash, Perl, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Java, Ruby, Go, etc. Almost everything that's big was usable by people don't read an entire book before they can make "Hello world".
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  There are some serious gotchas like nix-env in this read I would like to delete. But, that said, I don't think targeting "drive by usesr" is worth it. The benefits of Nix is that it dramatically organizes the absolute disgusting mess that is how most people manage their computer. I don't want to drive people trying things out away, but Nix will never be worth it unless you embrace it, and half-ways usage will deliver all the downsides without enough of the upsides. Not every value function is monotonic like that, I am not going to pretend it's otherwise. The goal is to help people fully embrace it, not to allow them to comfortably come to a stand-still half way.
  - ben0x539 6y ago
    I've used NixOS at home since like 2016. While I haven't used it professionally or for "serious" enthusiast deployments, I don't think I can claim to be a drive-by user. I still insist on using nix-env because it's what all the first-party manuals tell me to do and I don't want to get into a situation where I am experiencing huge pain and the first-party people all tell me "well, that's on you for doing things in a different way". At least my impression from a while ago is that the actual documentation Nix has seems to be aimed at "drive-by" or at least casusal/entry-level users, and to get the deeper insights that make the whole thing enjoyable, you need to give up on the documentation and just absorb all the details from github discussions, through extensive trial&error, etc.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      Yeah people say the docs are unapproachable, but I agree the docs are too much "here is how to do a bunch of random things" and not enough systematically describing what Nix is. Reference first, then tutorials.
      - oblio 6y ago
        That's not how humans work. Good tutorials first, reference second.
  - thomastjeffery 6y ago
    Organizing that mess should make every user a casual user, serious it not?
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      hmm? Genuinely unsure what you mean.
      - thomastjeffery 6y ago
        The word serious was meant to be should. My phone keyboard picked the wrong word, and I waited too long to edit.
- thomastjeffery 6y ago
  > Most users of anything are drive-by, rather casual users. On top of this, Nix could be extremely well suited to casual users. It inherently avoids most of the problems that plague casual users of traditional package management tools. Unfortunately, most of the more serious Nix contributores I have interacted with are in too deep to see the usability problems. Even worse, usability issues get trivialized, and users who ask for basic improvements get talked down and told they just aren't getting the magic of Nix. For example, the topic of versions has been argued about for over five years: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/9682 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/9682
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  To agree with you: I've used nix for a few projects over the past couple of years, always because I wouldn't have done the project without it (or I would have had to learn a series of separate solutions). I have never learnt nix, except to get it to do what I want. When I started, it was full on "what is the magical incantation to make it do what I want?" mode. Now I am usually capable of saying "to do X I need to do Y; what is the documentation for Y?", and when I find the documentation for Y it usually conforms to my presuppositions and merely adds detail and color. This is a really weird feeling. The idea that Nix/nixpkgs makes sense is so shocking to the core of my being. But it is still difficult even to find the documentation I want. But nix does give me another feeling that I like: confidence that I am building a system.
seqizz 6y ago
By "services" do you mean the ones you find on options page[1]? If yes, I never needed to dive into nixpkgs repo since that link provides every option + their expected input types. [1]: https://search.nixos.org/options https://search.nixos.org/options

oblio 6y ago

> If you use Nix in a "drive-by" kind of way, it's very hard to make any inroads into the language. The documentation and tutorials are not really intended for a casual user - it is expected you will sit down with the Nix site like a good book, and go at it from start to finish. If (like me) you instead touch Nix little and often, doing small invocations or on-the-fly editing, the docs are much less useful. This is super serious, major, I hope the devs are paying attention. Most users of anything are drive-by, rather casual users. Think of any big tech out there: they became popular precisely because they were easy to get started (at least back when they were launched/became popular): C, Unix, Bash, Perl, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Java, Ruby, Go, etc. Almost everything that's big was usable by people don't read an entire book before they can make "Hello world".

Ericson2314 6y ago
There are some serious gotchas like nix-env in this read I would like to delete. But, that said, I don't think targeting "drive by usesr" is worth it. The benefits of Nix is that it dramatically organizes the absolute disgusting mess that is how most people manage their computer. I don't want to drive people trying things out away, but Nix will never be worth it unless you embrace it, and half-ways usage will deliver all the downsides without enough of the upsides. Not every value function is monotonic like that, I am not going to pretend it's otherwise. The goal is to help people fully embrace it, not to allow them to comfortably come to a stand-still half way.
- ben0x539 6y ago
  I've used NixOS at home since like 2016. While I haven't used it professionally or for "serious" enthusiast deployments, I don't think I can claim to be a drive-by user. I still insist on using nix-env because it's what all the first-party manuals tell me to do and I don't want to get into a situation where I am experiencing huge pain and the first-party people all tell me "well, that's on you for doing things in a different way". At least my impression from a while ago is that the actual documentation Nix has seems to be aimed at "drive-by" or at least casusal/entry-level users, and to get the deeper insights that make the whole thing enjoyable, you need to give up on the documentation and just absorb all the details from github discussions, through extensive trial&error, etc.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    Yeah people say the docs are unapproachable, but I agree the docs are too much "here is how to do a bunch of random things" and not enough systematically describing what Nix is. Reference first, then tutorials.
    - oblio 6y ago
      That's not how humans work. Good tutorials first, reference second.
- thomastjeffery 6y ago
  Organizing that mess should make every user a casual user, serious it not?
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    hmm? Genuinely unsure what you mean.
    - thomastjeffery 6y ago
      The word serious was meant to be should. My phone keyboard picked the wrong word, and I waited too long to edit.
thomastjeffery 6y ago
> Most users of anything are drive-by, rather casual users. On top of this, Nix could be extremely well suited to casual users. It inherently avoids most of the problems that plague casual users of traditional package management tools. Unfortunately, most of the more serious Nix contributores I have interacted with are in too deep to see the usability problems. Even worse, usability issues get trivialized, and users who ask for basic improvements get talked down and told they just aren't getting the magic of Nix. For example, the topic of versions has been argued about for over five years: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/9682 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/9682
squiggleblaz 6y ago
To agree with you: I've used nix for a few projects over the past couple of years, always because I wouldn't have done the project without it (or I would have had to learn a series of separate solutions). I have never learnt nix, except to get it to do what I want. When I started, it was full on "what is the magical incantation to make it do what I want?" mode. Now I am usually capable of saying "to do X I need to do Y; what is the documentation for Y?", and when I find the documentation for Y it usually conforms to my presuppositions and merely adds detail and color. This is a really weird feeling. The idea that Nix/nixpkgs makes sense is so shocking to the core of my being. But it is still difficult even to find the documentation I want. But nix does give me another feeling that I like: confidence that I am building a system.

seqizz 6y ago

By "services" do you mean the ones you find on options page[1]? If yes, I never needed to dive into nixpkgs repo since that link provides every option + their expected input types. [1]: https://search.nixos.org/options https://search.nixos.org/options