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Nix (& NixOS) are very much in the same "as code" as Terraform. -- You put in extra effort now, to save effort later. This isn't traditionally 'practical'. It'
by rgoulter 2mo ago
Nix (& NixOS) are very much in the same "as code" as Terraform. -- You put in extra effort now, to save effort later.
This isn't traditionally 'practical'. It's quicker to just install the package, compared to writing a declaration that says to make the package available. (And for ops, Docker images won out in terms of practicality).
Nix also quite a steep learning curve.. I expect a beginner just wants to learn how to write a package in Nix, and not learn about 'derivations', 'instantiation', etc.
Interesting to see LLM coding agents adjust that trade-off: significantly reducing the cost to "write something in Nix", so the benefits become much cheaper.
- jbstack 2mo agoIt's true that the Nix language is quite difficult to learn. However, part of that is the poor documentation, and the weird situation where flakes are the de facto modern way of doing things, but are still treated as an "experimental" feature (which leads to further confusion when reading documentation based on the old way of doing things). Luckily LLMs can help with this too. I asked ChatGPT to generate a course with just enough content to help an ordinary NixOS user configure their system, work with Nix code and flakes, and create/modify simple packages (which is rarely needed anyway). Just a few hours of that gave me a much stronger understanding than all the documentation / tutorials I had read before.