[davexunit]

Both the Nix language and the Dockerfile language include embedding shell scripts. Let's not pretend that Docker doesn't have its own DSL to learn. Dockerfile's are imperative, where as Nix is declarative and functional, which is a big improvement.

[fishnchips]

I see Docker's DSL as a rather thin layer of abstraction as compared with Nix. Re: declarative vs. functional I believe this does not matter all this much in containerland. As long as I can get sh*t done deterministically, I could not care less about the programming paradigm that got me there.

[davexunit]

>As long as I can get sh*t done deterministically

Docker is non-deterministic. If you and I build the same image, we are not going to get the same result. See https://reproducible-builds.org for more information on the subject.