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> I do think people give the language itself to much grief when the problem is more the library side with the copious override shenanagins and other stuff. I s
by tikhonj 5y ago
> I do think people give the language itself to much grief when the problem is more the library side with the copious override shenanagins and other stuff.
I sympathize with this, honestly—the separation between Nix the language and Nixpkgs the library/codebase is just an implementation detail from the point of view of the user. This is especially true for core constructs like overrides—overriding is a pretty fundamental abstraction that would be part of a differently designed language, so the fact that it's more like a Nixpkgs convention is not going to be clear (or particularly useful) to somebody learning Nix.
- Ericson2314 5y agoI think you have the mindset right, so thanks for elucidating that. I would still push back. Ultimately library + language is serving a single goal here, but "means to an end" != mere implementation detail! As a user of a language, it's incumbent upon you to learn the difference between library vs langauge in what you write. Full stop. I do wish Nixpkgs would be less rediculous. I wish there was a GUI too! But people who are going to write some code still need to learn the difference between language and library way. Ultimately I don't think a more mainstream language would even help with the override soup problem, and we will need a logic programming type thing, but that's a separate point.