[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.