5 ms·
> I'm a SWE and I don't grok it yet. I think the biggest difficulty most people have is that it's a pure functional language, and that is quite foreign to a lo
by ris 5y ago
> I'm a SWE and I don't grok it yet.
I think the biggest difficulty most people have is that it's a pure functional language, and that is quite foreign to a lot of people, even many SWEs.
It's something that's not going to change though because it's a fundamental part of why Nix works so well.
- JoelMcCracken 5y agoI mean, I am very used to pure functional programming and I still find Nix quite challenging. For a lot of reasons. The abstractions are all weird, there are so many pieces that are confusingly put together, etc. Lots of stuff. Even the PL itself is really weird and unfamiliar. And not super well documented. I remember spending a while not too long ago trying to figure out how to interpolate a string. And then you have goofy stuff like with, etc.
- kokada 5y agoExactly. Before learning Nix I used Elixir and Clojure, so I was pretty much at home using a functional language (even if Clojure/Elixir are not exactly pure functional, but they come close with their immutable data structures). The other thing that trips some people is that Nix has lazy evaluation. Even Elixir or Clojure uses eager evaluation, so this concept is even more uncommon the functional programming. However, this concept bite me just a few times, so it is not like you have frequent issues with it.
- eximius 5y agoHaskell is easier to pick up than Nix.