> the difficulty people have with it is that it’s functional, not that it’s nix. My experience is that the difficulty people have is with Nixpkgs as a library/

> the difficulty people have with it is that it’s functional, not that it’s nix. My experience is that the difficulty people have is with Nixpkgs as a library/codebase rather than the language itself. Poor error message, unclear abstractions, lots of things managed through implicit conventions rather than in the language itself... it's a massive legacy codebase with a lot of internal inconsistency and some questionable practices. I'm convinced that if you had a magic codebase-cleaning wand and kept literally everything else about Nix (the language, the model, derivations) the same, you'd fix like 90% of the problems people have with the system.