[TheYumasi]

> Maybe that is difficult for people who haven't had an experience with pure/functional programming?

I found my understanding of the Nix language became a lot better once I started learning some Haskell. Specifically once I understood what currying was about.

My real gripe with Nix is the lack of a complete, easy to find, documentation of its "standard library". Nix Pills & a few wiki pages are far from enough.

[jonringer117]

All builtins functions can how render doc with `:doc` in the `nix repl`. I think there's work to make this possible with any arbitrary function.

[ghostwriter]

> My real gripe with Nix is the lack of a complete, easy to find, documentation of its "standard library". Nix Pills & a few wiki pages are far from enough.

How hard have you tried? It's literally two clicks and one scroll away from the official home page: https://nixos.org/ -> click "Learn" -> Scroll down -> click "Full Nix Manual":

https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/expressions/builtins.htm...

[kstenerud]

The other problem is the condescending replies from the higher tier nix folks while everyone else struggles. I almost think they garner a sadistic pleasure in watching everyone fail.

After months of "It's obviously this" and "you're not even trying" and "have you even looked?" and "there are plenty of examples out there already" and "you should start out by reading the introduction docs" and "you obviously don't know how functional languages work", I just stopped bothering.

[mindslight]

I think the impedance mismatch is because some things are really simple, but are not documented in a way that is discoverable by someone who doesn't know, and is searching in the paradigm they do know.

I was trying to figure out how to install new machines from a central build host. Neither the straightforward install CD process, nor system.build.qcow2 made sense. I popped into the IRC channel to ask, and it turns out a 'nix build' 'nix copy', 'nix-env --store --set' and 'switch-to-configuration boot' did the trick. That's an extreme amount of power and simplicity that just kind of obviates a whole set of heavyweight processes (eg Debian automated-install). But if you are searching around for the usual type of automated install process, you just come up empty handed looking for it.

[aaronchall]

Maybe you should look within.

I'm still a long ways from understanding everything Nix/NixOS completely, but I've never gotten these kinds of comments apart from the extremely reasonable "you should start out by reading the introduction docs" - that the directions lead with.

And if you have a problem with that, I can see how you might have provoked that kind of response that seems so out of character to me.

I ask questions when I have them, and sometimes I get answers from them, and sometimes I answer them myself.

But I started off reading as much of the docs as I could tolerate before and while getting started, and always trying to self-help before asking for help.

[kstenerud]

This is a pretty good example the kind of victim blaming I'm talking about. It's a kind of insidious toxicity that permeates certain communities, although I've not been able to put my finger on what exactly brings it out, or why it's so tightly clung to as an acceptable behavior in some places.

I actually tried to help for awhile, and even started a help guide https://github.com/kstenerud/nixos-beginners-handbook/

But eventually one gets ground down and demoralized enough to just give up. It's a real shame, because I LOVE what NixOS is trying to accomplish.

[aaronchall]

I'm not trying to judge you harshly. I'm trying to understand.

In your first post in this thread, "high tier" NixOS users were called condescending sadists. This is a libel as far as I can tell based on my own experience.

Then was a list of disliked phrases, and second to last in that list was the instruction to read the manual. I believe in reading manuals, as difficult and time-consuming as the effort may be. This made me think expectations for using the project were wrong.

Now you're linking to a repo you made to attempt to give new users a guide to getting started.

You clearly made an effort to be part of the solution. This is admirable.

I'm trying to connect dots here - what I think happened was, in the course of trying to get help filling in the blanks, you probably exhausted the patience of others trying to help you.

I question if what you've been trying to do works at this point in the project's lifecycle. What you're trying to do is hard enough in a completely mature project. In an environment where we acknowledge the incompleteness of documentation, new command line APIs that are evolving, and new ways of doing things (I'm currently thinking of containers after looking at your guide, and flakes as well), communicating a true North is extremely difficult especially if you aren't one of the core developers immersed in the current state of change.

I don't think the project is mature enough to declare a "right way" to do all the things. I don't think we have enough mature users to support filling in all the blanks, yet, either.

I'm sorry you've had the experience you've had. Maybe after taking a break, you can resume your efforts, but with tempered expectations. We're all asking a lot of people who volunteer their time to build what should be acknowledged as a strategically important approach to computing.

We need more experts. The experts we do have are over-worked and under-appreciated. Perhaps you can help us there one day too.

[kstenerud]

Yes what you say absolutely all makes sense. My main gripe is that of culture, not substance.

It's understood and well communicated that the project is not mature enough to be an easy experience for a new user, and that's perfectly fair. But unfortunately, there's a degree of gatekeeperism going on in this community that is making the environment toxic for newcomers.

I've only seen it a few times before, but in every case, the longtimers seem unable to see it, and dismiss complaints by newcomers out of hand. Of course it's to be expected that a certain cohort of newcomers will be toxic and entitled, in which case one would absolutely be justified in dismissing them.

But that is not the case here, especially judging from the sheer number of upvotes my comments on this matter have received, and the number of blog posts in the wild about this very topic.

This is not a problem of maturity, but one of culture. And this is what exhausted me and made me give up on my attempt to make things better.

[rgoulter]

Right, it's unpleasant to see snark.

I hope my original comment doesn't read that way. I mean more "the Nix language isn't much different from something you're familiar with".

> "you should start out by reading the introduction docs"

This one I kinda buy, though.

With programming, with many things, you can get quite far without having to understand all the details. And many tools do quite well by being intuitive to use.

Nix is quite weird. And can be quite difficult. And it's got a small community, so it's under-documented and you won't always be able to find someone who's run into the same problem with a good explanation as to how to fix it.

[all2]

This right here is enough for me to not even bother tying this OS. I'm always interested in operating systems (and the adjacent config systems that live on top of the Linux kernel, Arch Linux is one of those, Gentoo is another). But I'm not so interested in adding vitriol to my life, no matter the technical excellence. I'd rather live with a mundane kludge than deal with knowledge elitism.

[tadfisher]

In my experience the Nix community is extremely welcoming and refreshingly vitriol-free. This person isn't representative of the community.

[lonecom]

>I'd rather live with a mundane kludge than deal with knowledge elitism.

But I would put up with a lot, if the payoff is more knowledge.

[alar44]

Lol cause one guy was cranky on the internet?

[ghostwriter]

> The other problem is the condescending replies from the higher tier nix folks while everyone else struggles.

You may not like the reply, but the fact remains: the comment I replied to was a lie. It says there's hardly anything but Wiki pages and Nix Pills and that there's no "easy to find, documentation of its "standard library". And the exact document has been two clicks away from them for a long time.

> I just stopped bothering.

Another problem is your impatience and inability to perform searching and research for necessary information without anyone's help. The lack of focus and motivation to spend a little extra time to discover, learn, and build an intuition around a new toolchain is on you. How much time have you spent on useless media content on youtube or netflix lately instead having another try with the tool?

[bpye]

It’s obviously anecdotal but I’ve found the Nix community extremely supportive and haven’t really had that experience when asking questions. I typically stick to IRC but I have asked my fair share of dumb questions without any replies I’d call snarky…

[rgoulter]

Nix is wonderful, but absolutely is under-documented. (In part due to a small community, etc.).

A couple of examples I've run into:

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2259 showed people trying to make use of the "hello world" package which was given in the NixPkgs manual, but couldn't quite figure out how to get it to build.

e.g. if you want a package that's a simple script, "writeScriptBin" seems like what you'd want. -- But it's really not clear how to use it from the manual; you'd have to read the nixpkgs source. https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#trivial-builder-wri...

[ghostwriter]

> you'd have to read the nixpkgs source. https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#trivial-builder-wri...

Is it too much to ask from developers in 2022? At source, the function is well documented and is provided with an example [1]. The only missing part is a rendered HTML with the same information.

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/build-supp...

[HotHotLava]

It's one thing to look at the source, it's another thing to know that you have to look inside `pkgs/build-support/trivial-builders.nix` to find the documentation. One of the main advantages of reference documentation is a central place to look up what things do.

[ghostwriter]

`writeScriptBin` is the second topmost link on Google search that leads directly to that file in a central repository of nixpkgs. Unique function names have the advantage of being transparent references that you can find either via google, or github search, or grep on your local checkout of nixpkgs.

[rgoulter]

In 2022, I think it's a reasonable expectation that API documentation can be accessed as rendered HTML. -- e.g. Haskell's or Rust's documentation even links to the source for the packages.

On the other hand, I think it's fair to say NixOS will sometimes require a high level of involvement from its users. When something goes wrong on another OS, it's easy to search for the answer. With NixOS, you have to understand both the Linux part, and the NixOS part.

[dmitriid]

> Is it too much to ask from developers in 2022?

In 2022 it's not too much to ask from the developers of the tools to provide:

- consistent and up-to-date documentation (that's built and updated together with the source code)

- consistent, readable and understandable error messages

[darkarmani]

> Is it too much to ask from developers in 2022?

It's not too much to ask for non-production ready software. If nixos is supposed to be production ready, then yes.

[ghostwriter]

NixOS is production ready, productive teams that care about reproducibility use it in a variety of production environments already.