[kmicklas]

Agreed, Nix the language is probably unnecessary. (The main benefit I can think of is avoiding depending on the moving target that is basically any other scripting language they could have tried to co-opt.)

[dottedmag]

To be fair, Nix language is completely different from other languages out there -- it employs only immutable data structures -- so using another language would not be possible.

It does not excuse Nix to have such a braindamaged^W esoteric syntax.

[kmicklas]

> To be fair, Nix language is completely different from other languages out there -- it employs only immutable data structures -- so using another language would not be possible.

I don't think the immutability is actually important. Only derivations (which are basically language agnostic) need to be immutable/hashable.

> It does not excuse Nix to have such a braindamaged^W esoteric syntax.

What's so bad about it? The main pain point I've found with it is the lack of documentation for builtin functions. The syntax seems fine to me.

[derefr]

A programming language that "employs only immutable data structures" is effectively a macro processor language, no? Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language) .

[ithkuil]

Jsonnet is the closest I could find.

[arghimonmobile0]

I feel like I should plug Guix at this point. Pretty much similar to Nix, but the config language is Guile, which is Scheme.