The Nix language's main concern is handling large scale configuration. General purpose programming and scripting is completely out of scope. The Nixpkgs reposi

The Nix language's main concern is handling large scale configuration. General purpose programming and scripting is completely out of scope. The Nixpkgs repository has over 80,000 packages [1] contained in a single key-value store. The design of the Nix language not only makes this sustainable, but even compelling. For one thing, Nix package descriptions are composable and easy to manipulate programmatically. It's common practice to create new packages on the fly out of existing package definitions, and it's what the Nix language is particularly good at. Things like this add a lot of complex inter-dependencies within the Nixpkgs code base, and it still manages to be comprehensible. The same approach isn't practical with general purpose imperative programming languages. A quick glance at Nixpkgs repository reveals that it contains over 2.4 million lines of Nix code. Imagine that much Java/Python code manipulating a single global mutable data structure. It can only result in a nightmare. Additionally, the notion that the Nix is Haskell and is therefore incomprehensible is an often repeated meme without any backing details and needs to stop. If any language is similar to Nix, it's Jsonnet. But I haven't seen a single person criticizing Jsonnet [2] for being Haskell. If you can understand JSON and have no problem writing functions for any common language, then there really should be no problem learning the Nix language. [1]: https://search.nixos.org/packages https://search.nixos.org/packages [2]: https://jsonnet.org https://jsonnet.org