[JamesSwift]

> well designed systems have a way of making sense so that documentation and understanding flows naturally from base abstractions

Honestly, thats the main revelation I had when going through that playlist. Basically Nix is just attribute sets (which is sort of just a JSON object). The entire thing. Nix files are just some preamble and then they return an attribute set at the end. Understanding that will get you 90% of the way there in terms of understanding the syntax and being able to cut through the "weirdness".

At that point its about understanding actual concepts like overlays, derivations, etc but its much easier now that you understand the attrset concept.

[yesbabyyes]

I hear you, I think I understand what you mean and I definitely want to believe you, but how come this can't be explained in a succinct written documentation, instead of a series of video tutorials by example?

I do realize it's a work of passion done by numerous volunteers, to whom I feel gratitude, but at this point, why can't this be adequately defined, in a written form, in a way that is understandable? To me, the concept of a series of projections of declarative configuration statements onto a final state is not hard to understand in itself; yet, I am somewhat struggling to create and maintain such a configuration without feeling that I am just copypasting bits and pieces from random people.

I guess I just have to bite the apple and spend a few days watching YouTube to see if I reach enlightenment - at this point, I barely understand the function names.

[JamesSwift]

Yeah like I said, I struggled for a couple _years_ on having a feeling of complete confusion when copying a shell.nix to every project I spun up. I was never able to understand _any_ of the written documentation. After that playlist I easily click through the actual nixpkgs repo itself and find almost everything I need to handroll my own derivations.

It seems like the community is just a bunch of people who have had that lightbulb go on already, so its hard to go back and view things without the lightbulb on.