I actually think as a language Nix's runtime semantics are worse than borgcfg. Both have an obtuse and confusing syntax it's true. But Nix's extreme approach to

I actually think as a language Nix's runtime semantics are worse than borgcfg. Both have an obtuse and confusing syntax it's true. But Nix's extreme approach to laziness in the language means it essentially has "come from" semantics which is the source of the spooky action at a distance that the author speaks about. This combined with a lack of compile time type checking means that that debugging your nix code comes pretty close to feeling impossible. It is deterministic but tracking down what exactly broke your nix package code can be difficult when the source could literally be almost anywhere.