4 ms·

the read has “words of warning” almost immediately at the top about being familiar with nix first. it’s the gateway drug to nix? bad docs and difficult to grok

• zamalek 4y ago
  You're only likely to screw things up once you start digging deeper into the Nix language/stdlib. I was put off by the warning at first as well, but it's honestly awesome having functional dotfiles that work reasonably consistently across NixOS (personal)/Ubuntu (work)/MacOS (work). > bad docs Yeah, pretty damned awful. > error messages That too. I honestly think that inventing a language was a huge mistake. Guix took a much more sensible approach, but a libre kernel is unusable for 99.9999% of people.
  • kaba0 4y ago
    Honestly, it really is not the language that’s the problem. While there are a few cases where it can trip you up at first, you wouldn’t be singing package descriptors even if it were Python — it simply has a business domain which is non-trivial. This non-triviality and organic growth show on the standard library of nix packages, but I fail to see how a lisp language or whatever be immune to it, besides having learned from some early abstractions mistakes.
    • zamalek 4y ago
      Nix is building a package manager AND a programming language. Guix is building a package manager only. It's a resourcing thing.
      • kaba0 4y ago
        And one might even argue the opposite, a DSL made for creating packages may well be better. Especially that plenty of package descriptions are basically reads like JSON.
        • zamalek 4y ago
          Fair enough, that's a really good point.
• __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  It's kind of like LSD, your just gonna be unprepared the first time, and the second time...