[dtwhitney]

I could not agree with you more! I use nix daily, and every time I go to edit it a nix file a voice in the back of my head says, "you should really start that Haskell to Nix compiler you've been thinking about." [edit] ha! just notice the next comment talking about hnix. Great minds... :)

[regnat]

You might be interested in dhall[0] and dhal-to-nix[1] which provides a really neat haskell-like language that compiles to nix.

[0]: https://github.com/Gabriel439/Haskell-Dhall-Library [1]: https://github.com/Gabriel439/Haskell-Dhall-Library

[atemerev]

If only Haskellers knew that "a blog post" and "type definitions in Hackage" are not documentation...

Also, the comma-first syntax like

{ foo = "bar"

, baz = "qux"

}

drives me nuts. In the name of all good things in the world, why?

[radarsat1]

> comma-first syntax

oooh but this is one of those trivial things that I really liked in my brief days of using Haskell, and that has sometimes carried over to my C++, e.g. in initializer lists. I find it super useful because everything lines up nicely, and from the point of view of version control you don't have to edit the previous line to change '}' to ',' when adding a new line.

[weberc2]

Go solves this problem by permitting

    foo := Foo{
        x: 10,
        y: 24,
    }

[mercurial]

Also Perl, Python, Javascript and Rust.

[weberc2]

JavaScript doesn't (didn't?) let you put a trailing comma in function parameter lists, annoyingly.

[teddyh]

Python does this, too.

[coldtea]

How about allowing for bloody danging commas?

[wereHamster]

Is there any real disadvantage to comma-first, other than aesthetics (which is entirely a personal preference)?

[ykler]

Yes, when the commas are at the beginning of the line they are really obvious. I have used commas-first style in JavaScript, and it definitely reduced the amount of times I forgot a comma.

I wonder if people's aversion to commas first has something to do with the fact that commas have a very familiar use in ordinary writing, and there they always follow a word. It is very common to see BNF grammars written with leading vertical bars, and no one seems to mind that -- in fact it would be unusual to use trailing vertical bars.

By the way, a bunch of languages permit a trailing comma after the last element of a list. This is also nice because it means that if you put each list item on a line, the list items all have the same format (thing plus comma). With the Haskell syntax, you lose this, but there is no reason a language couldn't support a leading comma before the first element of a list.

[coldtea]

The wrath of God that it imposes on people who think it's acceptable, for one...

[weberc2]

It's another thing to learn, and the total learning curve is the product of all of these idiosyncrasies (and features) (not the sum). And there's absolutely no advantage to comma-first.

[Jweb_Guru]

It makes git diffs inaccurate compared to trailing commas.

[ben0x539]

Wow, I'm doing the opposite where I'm staring at all these other DSLs and configuration files and have to hold myself back from writing a bunch of nix to autogenerate them from.

[nv-vn]

Haha same here, I've been considering writing Nix expressions for window manager configurations for quite some time now, but some config files are so complex that it would take ages.