Hi, author here. While I agree that the language could be improved, I wonder why you say that this makes it uglier, and how you'd imagine a better solution (this is still in development, and any idea is welcome).
Unfortunately no, except maybe for some very minor tweaks that have a chance to be included in vanilla nix, but otherwise this would most probably either mean the death of this project or a split in the (already small) community, which I both don't want to see
The only place where I think we could make the semicolons optional is at the end of a let-binding or a record (like json does iirc), which would indeed be a small but blessed change.
For the array litterals, I don't really see which improvements your syntax brings (except suppressing the space-separated list, which conflicts with the syntax for function application). Is it used somewhere else ?
(I can't reply to the previous message regarding no-semicolon syntax, so I have to do it here. I definitely do not want to propose whitespace-sensitive syntax — just newline-sensitive, like in Scala, Swift, modern ECMAscript, or just any modern programming language with C-like syntax. Semicolons are allowed, BTW — they are just optional and inferred from newlines).
Is that a definite no, and there's no chance of compiling whatever $newLanguage is written to the current nix code prior to execution?
If that was possible, and a few $000 was raised (looking at the comments here, I think people would chip in) then a new version of the Nixlang with the same semantics and full backwards compatibility but a cleaner syntax, would be a great project to fundraise for.
Can't it just accept two different syntaxes (if really necessary for disambiguation, perhaps requiring people to put some magic string at the beginning of the file to request the new syntax)?
If yes, I can draft a proposal.