I wonder lately whether the pain is really the primary issue. As I've gotten deeper into using Terraform at work, I've found it much, much more painful than Ni

I wonder lately whether the pain is really the primary issue. As I've gotten deeper into using Terraform at work, I've found it much, much more painful than Nix— so much so that it has me questioning whether I want to continue to work with cloud infrastructure at all. Yet Terraform is 'industry standard' and widely praised, where Nix is marginal and maligned for its difficulty. Maybe it's because people think of NixOS more than Nix in all its broad uses, and when they do so they compare NixOS to desktop operating systems where those people don't see themselves as very interested in configuration management. But I wish that many industry standard tools had comparable iteration times to Nix, or concise languages like Nix, reliable transitions between configurations like Nix, efficient caching like Nix, minimally destructive replacement of old resources like Nix, etc. Most of the things people call 'immutable infrastructure' today are painfully slow and transparently mutable. I'm much happier when I'm reliably iterating on local Nix stuff than when I'm praying that `terraform plan`'s success isn't a fluke this time, and that the corresponding `terraform apply` will actually succeed. I'd rather spend an hour on the the thorniest Nix issues than spend 30 minutes fucking around trying to 'help' Terraform delete a resource that requires manual intervention to actually delete, for some godforsaken reason.