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by kragen
2314 days ago
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I feel like (inputs `(("libevent" ,libevent) ("ncurses" ,ncurses))) is pretty bad compared to buildInputs = [ ncurses libevent makeWrapper ]; even if you go by token count. (I think it's 16 vs. 8.) A different problem is that syntactically the Scheme version looks like a call to a function called “inputs” and I don't think it is; that depends on context. In general in Lisps the interpretation of everything depends on syntactic context, so you have to do a lot of processing consciously that you can do subconsciously in languages that have a syntax. (There's an indentation error in either your example or my browser that makes that input clause appear to belong to the origin clause rather than the package clause, btw. The extra redundancy of the different kinds of delimiters makes that error harder to make in Nix. I wrote about this more at length in http://www.paulgraham.com/redund.html ) The module imports at the top are a lot more egregious but that's because they're using Guile’s module system naked; it's not really the fault of Scheme's syntax per se and I think you could hack together some kind of macrological solution. I think Scheme is brilliant and probably a better choice, but I think the syntactic cost is pretty heavy in your example. When it comes to Nix and Guix, though, these are kind of minor details. More important questions are things like “does it have the software I want in it” and “how reproducible is it” and “how do I figure out what's broken”. |
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One is nicer than the other in a few different minor ways, but overall I think it's basically a wash. I'd not consider verbosity a factor if choosing between the two.
>(There's an indentation error in either your example or my browser that makes that input clause appear to belong to the origin clause rather than the package clause, btw.
Sorry about that, I botched the indentation when I pasted that into my scratch buffer, which had unbalanced parens in it. That's on me.