[rekado]

> Guix uses Guile instead of the nix expression language for defining packages. > Honestly, I don't understand that choice. [...]

Then maybe you should not have written a whole paragraph speculating about political reasons.

Pretty much everything in Guix is written in Guile. The only exception is the daemon. The build derivations themselves are in Guile again. Having almost everything in Guile is great as it allows us to use different stages for code by quoting S-expressions. It gives programmatic access to package definitions and turns Guix into a library. This has proven invaluable as it made it quite simple to build a package manager web interface, recursive importers that take into account what packages have already been defined, package expression updaters, an Emacs interface using Geiser, a graphing tool, etc.

The values we hold also have an impact on how we approach functional package management. I'm working on reproducible Java, for example, building everything from source rather than accepting pre-packaged jars. This is a very slow process, but we are able to draw the complete dependency graph without having to accept binary blobs (e.g. for maven dependencies).