[zamalek]

You're only likely to screw things up once you start digging deeper into the Nix language/stdlib. I was put off by the warning at first as well, but it's honestly awesome having functional dotfiles that work reasonably consistently across NixOS (personal)/Ubuntu (work)/MacOS (work).

> bad docs

Yeah, pretty damned awful.

> error messages

That too.

I honestly think that inventing a language was a huge mistake. Guix took a much more sensible approach, but a libre kernel is unusable for 99.9999% of people.

[kaba0]

Honestly, it really is not the language that’s the problem. While there are a few cases where it can trip you up at first, you wouldn’t be singing package descriptors even if it were Python — it simply has a business domain which is non-trivial. This non-triviality and organic growth show on the standard library of nix packages, but I fail to see how a lisp language or whatever be immune to it, besides having learned from some early abstractions mistakes.

[zamalek]

Nix is building a package manager AND a programming language. Guix is building a package manager only. It's a resourcing thing.

[kaba0]

And one might even argue the opposite, a DSL made for creating packages may well be better. Especially that plenty of package descriptions are basically reads like JSON.

[zamalek]

Fair enough, that's a really good point.