Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yjftsjthsd-h 2131 days ago
As someone coming from the computing side of things, I found nix to be quite difficult to grok enough to write a package spec, and guix was pretty close, at least in part because of the whole "packages are just side-effects of a functional programming language" idea. At least nix also suffers from a lot of "magic"; if you're trying to package, say, an autotools package then the work's done for you - and that's great, right up until you try to package something that doesn't fit into the existing patterns and you're in for a world of hurt.

Basically, the learning curve is nearly vertical.
1 comments
rekado 2131 days ago
> guix was pretty close, at least in part because of the whole "packages are just side-effects of a functional programming language" idea

This must be a misunderstanding. One of the big visible differences of Guix compared to Nix is that packages are first-class values.

link
yjftsjthsd-h 2131 days ago
You're right; on further reading I can see guix making packages the actual output of functions. I do maintain that the use of a whole functional language to build packages raises the barrier to entry, but my precise criticism was incorrect.
link