[pmahoney]

I may be in the minority, but I like the Nix language.

I don't have extensive ML or Haskell experience, coming from Ruby/Java background.

I think the Nix language works great as a configuration language, and I greatly prefer it to JSON, YAML, or Ruby, which are often used for similar purposes. The way arguments are passed in, merging of attribute sets, the library from Nixpkgs with various list and set operators and other utilities, and great multiline string support make it far superior to those other config languages in my opinion.

My biggest gripe is that the Emacs mode isn't very strong, so I'm often applying indentation manually.

I recently learned about Jsonnet[1] which has some similarity with Nix.

[1] http://jsonnet.org/