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by dottedmag 3395 days ago
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.

3 comments

> 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.

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) .
Jsonnet is the closest I could find.