I'm a bit disappointed that nobody really answered your question. I admit that maybe asking for Nix to be simpler is a bit loaded, because I think people are ri

I'm a bit disappointed that nobody really answered your question. I admit that maybe asking for Nix to be simpler is a bit loaded, because I think people are right in that Nix is "simple", but it's definitely not simple to use in practice. Several people have worked on offshoots of Nix and the Nix language that try to address this in different ways. For example, there is Nickel: https://github.com/tweag/nickel https://github.com/tweag/nickel I think the Nix language is OK for what it is: lazy evaluation and functional purity is a good fit for what Nix aims to do. That said... I definitely feel like functionally-pure programming languages have trouble when it comes to trying to write maintainable code. I'm sure that statement would anger some, but it is my personal belief trying to use functional programming languages as a life long imperative programmer: the advantages of functional purity are pretty obvious, but writing code that you can't make sense of later is so much easier for me in functional languages. They're so powerful and elegant that writing nearly indecipherable things feels very tempting at times. So, I'd be interested in seeing someone attempt a Nix-like ecosystem built around something else. If Bazel can do "hermetic-ish" with Starlark, I reckon you could pull off something like Nix with it, too.