[Blikkentrekker]

NixOS is the distribution much how Haskell and Scheme are the programming languages in that in their lust for theoretical perfection and elegance, they do not see widespread adoption, but often have a lasting influence on other projects that take the useful parts from their elegant ideas and work them into something more practical.

[Ericson2314]

I've never bought this, I use Haskell and Nix all the time for GUIs and other nerd-phobic tasks. And it's definitely the most practical way I know of doing things.

Most people just want to cargo-cult what others do, and most things initially get popular because some way of deploying software requires it / makes it the path of least resistance. None of that is about practicality, just short-sightedness and ecosystem effects.

[hollerith]

Good point. Today most popular languages (or at least those with garbage collection) use lexical scoping of variables, which they copied from Scheme.