5 ms·

> Chose boring technology Doesn't fit in this case, I'd say Nix is still cutting edge. It may also be simple, but it's not easy (in the Rich Hickey sense).

spicybright 5y ago
Can you elaborate more? From what I've generally heard, Nix has been a good foundation for a lot of companies.
- mateuszf 5y ago
  As far as I know the final effect is great - getting reproducible, statically linked programs. However, learning Nix / NixOS is quite difficult - it requires a specific set of skills (functional programming, shell, Nix building blocks which you can learn from existing Nix code), the documentation is lacking, error messages are cryptic, debugging support is bad.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Yeah Nix is why "choose boring" is a bit of a misnomer. The truth is tautologically unhelpful: choose good technologies. Most people have trouble separating snake oil and fads from good things, so old/boring is a safe heuristic. Nix is not boring, but it is honest. It's hard because it doesn't take half measures. It's not an easy learning curve gaslighting to you to a dead end. But taste in choosing good technologies is hard to teach, especially when people's minds are warped by a shitty baseline.
    - tharne 5y ago
      > It's not an easy learning curve gaslighting to you to a dead end. This is a really good way of describing a certain type of technology. I'm stealing this line.
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        Please do! In this current era of VCs loving developer tool businesses, we are seeing a whole lot of this!
    - mountainriver 5y ago
      Thank you, I’ve always hated the Boring Technology idiom. The right tool doesn’t have to be boring, but it certainly can be
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      Nix isn't a good option for developing rails applications. The nix ecosystem doesn't have good support for ruby meaning you will waste a lot of time and run into a lot of issues getting stuff to work. That's not boring. An example of being boring would be using Nix for something like C where the ecosystem around it is already built up. I was really pro Nix at the time I took on a rails project and it caused many problems for my team due to Nix just not having good support for my use case. If I could go back in time I would definitely choose something else.
      - dqv 5y ago
        What was the problem you were having with Ruby (on Rails) and Nix? It wasn't ergonomic for me, but I was able to get things to work.
        charcircuit 5y ago
        I think one of the main issues was depending on a custom gem. And then something about sandboxing, and outdated things being cached (maybe this was just a rails thing though). Also setting up rails project was convoluted. It was just obvious that there wasn't much time devoted towards that use case of Nix. The rails support was more of just to handle packaging existing software as opposed to being good for a development environment.
        debaserab2 5y ago
        What do you mean exactly? At the end of the day, rails is just a collection of ruby gems. If nix has first class support for ruby and Gemfiles in theory there shouldn't be a ton of problems. I've not used Nix so I legitimately don't know (but I am quite interested in it)
        charcircuit 5y ago
        I don't remember exactly the problem since it was a couple years ago. There was a lot of issues in regards to failing to run / build rails which regarded doing special nix stuff to fix. It wasn't possible to include a custom gem from a separate directory. I had to disable some sort of sandboxing to prevent Nix from complaining. Nix kept getting in my way and as my team members were not familiar with Nix they couldn't fix it themselves. Sadly, I ruined their opinion of Nix by showing them it with this project.
- thealbert08 5y ago

spicybright 5y ago

Can you elaborate more? From what I've generally heard, Nix has been a good foundation for a lot of companies.

mateuszf 5y ago
As far as I know the final effect is great - getting reproducible, statically linked programs. However, learning Nix / NixOS is quite difficult - it requires a specific set of skills (functional programming, shell, Nix building blocks which you can learn from existing Nix code), the documentation is lacking, error messages are cryptic, debugging support is bad.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Yeah Nix is why "choose boring" is a bit of a misnomer. The truth is tautologically unhelpful: choose good technologies. Most people have trouble separating snake oil and fads from good things, so old/boring is a safe heuristic. Nix is not boring, but it is honest. It's hard because it doesn't take half measures. It's not an easy learning curve gaslighting to you to a dead end. But taste in choosing good technologies is hard to teach, especially when people's minds are warped by a shitty baseline.
  - tharne 5y ago
    > It's not an easy learning curve gaslighting to you to a dead end. This is a really good way of describing a certain type of technology. I'm stealing this line.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      Please do! In this current era of VCs loving developer tool businesses, we are seeing a whole lot of this!
  - mountainriver 5y ago
    Thank you, I’ve always hated the Boring Technology idiom. The right tool doesn’t have to be boring, but it certainly can be
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    Nix isn't a good option for developing rails applications. The nix ecosystem doesn't have good support for ruby meaning you will waste a lot of time and run into a lot of issues getting stuff to work. That's not boring. An example of being boring would be using Nix for something like C where the ecosystem around it is already built up. I was really pro Nix at the time I took on a rails project and it caused many problems for my team due to Nix just not having good support for my use case. If I could go back in time I would definitely choose something else.
    - dqv 5y ago
      What was the problem you were having with Ruby (on Rails) and Nix? It wasn't ergonomic for me, but I was able to get things to work.
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        I think one of the main issues was depending on a custom gem. And then something about sandboxing, and outdated things being cached (maybe this was just a rails thing though). Also setting up rails project was convoluted. It was just obvious that there wasn't much time devoted towards that use case of Nix. The rails support was more of just to handle packaging existing software as opposed to being good for a development environment.
        debaserab2 5y ago
        What do you mean exactly? At the end of the day, rails is just a collection of ruby gems. If nix has first class support for ruby and Gemfiles in theory there shouldn't be a ton of problems. I've not used Nix so I legitimately don't know (but I am quite interested in it)
        charcircuit 5y ago
        I don't remember exactly the problem since it was a couple years ago. There was a lot of issues in regards to failing to run / build rails which regarded doing special nix stuff to fix. It wasn't possible to include a custom gem from a separate directory. I had to disable some sort of sandboxing to prevent Nix from complaining. Nix kept getting in my way and as my team members were not familiar with Nix they couldn't fix it themselves. Sadly, I ruined their opinion of Nix by showing them it with this project.
thealbert08 5y ago