And also, if I understand correctly, NixOS and Guix need much less help from developers than this proposal would have. Specifically, NixOS and Guix don't care how anyone names anything (except, of course, their dogs).
is anyone using these systems in production? I would immediately apply to work in such a place.
It's a catch-22. The biggest gain in using NixOS/Guix are production systems big enough where it matters. And every place that grows big enough where this would be good for the them they usually roll their own ... Because tech-debt doesn't allow them from switching to another OS + they have so much duct-tape that if they'd replace it, would also have to find work for those doing the duct-taping. I think it's not a technical problem at all, nor do I think it's because we lack ideas.
Yes, there are places that are using NixOS in production. I don't know the details, so this is a placeholder for someone else to fill in - or else ask on the NixOS subreddit or IRC channel.
Nix/Guix is a very simple and elegant design, but I find it has a downside: because every package is immutable, a security fix in a low-level shared library (worst case: glibc) requires recompiling every package that depends on it, and because there is no difference between OS and applications - everything is a Nix package - you have to wait until the whole dependency graph is recompiled before you can effectively install the security update.
TFA's design avoids this by separating out both a base OS layer and an application runtime layer, both of which have a bounded size.
It's a catch-22. The biggest gain in using NixOS/Guix are production systems big enough where it matters. And every place that grows big enough where this would be good for the them they usually roll their own ... Because tech-debt doesn't allow them from switching to another OS + they have so much duct-tape that if they'd replace it, would also have to find work for those doing the duct-taping. I think it's not a technical problem at all, nor do I think it's because we lack ideas.