Nix is not about "development environments" (i.e. 'nix-shell'); that's just a side-effect which comes for free. Nix's main entry-point is 'nix-build', which run

Nix is not about "development environments" (i.e. 'nix-shell'); that's just a side-effect which comes for free. Nix's main entry-point is 'nix-build', which runs a specified executable with specified arguments and environment variables. (The same applies for the newer 'nix' CLI, but I'm less familiar with that)