[takeda]

I don't believe Nix is Turing complete, unless you include ability of running python or bash script.

Regarding the rest of your first paragraph, that's essentially what I said, you can write side effect free code in python, but it's so easy to introduce side effects if you're not paying attention.

I'm saying though that nix language isn't the hard part about nix, but perhaps you're right and it is one extra difficulty that just makes things harder.

But take a look at most o Nix derivations, majority of them end up being just an attribute set (aka dictionary, map etc in other languages)

Take look at https://nixos.org page (they changed it after this submission was posted, and it is better than the old page at showing what Nix can do)