The latter. As a (bad) analogy: it’s a bit like learning Haskell. If you’ve only ever worked in strictly-evaluated, imperative languages, it’s not gonna be easy

The latter. As a (bad) analogy: it’s a bit like learning Haskell. If you’ve only ever worked in strictly-evaluated, imperative languages, it’s not gonna be easy to learn. Nevertheless, Haskell predates e.g. Go by two decades. Nix (and Haskell) has its warts, and undoubtedly a new system would avoid them (compatibility needs make some changes very challenging), but the fundamental difficulty remains because it is fundamentally different and solving a truly difficult problem set.