I'm rooting for Nickel, I really am, but I am doubtful. Nix is so incredibly dynamic that I believe it's nearly impossible to give it a practical static type sy

I'm rooting for Nickel, I really am, but I am doubtful. Nix is so incredibly dynamic that I believe it's nearly impossible to give it a practical static type system. I say practicaly because I do believe it is possible to come up with a reasonable type system, it's just that it would be so complicated to use that hardly anyone actually would outside of extremely specific applications (see Agda, Idris, ...). In order to get something more reasonable, I think we would also need to rethink both the NixOS module and nixpkgs DSLs. Which is of course possible, but such a momentous task that I don't see it gaining much traction. I think it's more realistic, and maybe even sufficient to integrate better error reporting into Nix itself. This is surely also no easy feat, but I am confident some improvements could be made: for example, more acurate tracking of source locations. And while I almost always prefer static over dynamic typing, writing a specific NixOS config feels like it's one of the moments where it's less important, because I don't care about all possible executions working, I just need my specific config to work. This all changes once you write your own modules, where you obviously want all configurations to work, but that is less important for end user adoption IMO.