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And let me make some further general observations here, while I'm unfortunately procrastinating.

People use software to solve their problems. The way you "sell" (in whatever sense) software to people is by showing them which of their problems it solves (they don't even have to be explicitly aware they have those problems in the first place, BTW) and how.

Nix(OS) is adopted first and foremost because it clearly solves some pressing problems. It allows you to have many development environments that don't stomp on each other, without managing a zoo of containers or VMs. It allows you to specify the operating system (or even just the user environment) you use, over as many machines as you need, deterministically and while ensuring that once you solve a problem it stays solved.

Those are real pain points, and since Nix solves them it would be used by people regardless of those people feel about Nix-the-language, because language appreciation is not the main reason people use it -- pain is.

Some goes for Guix, obviously.

So if your goal (whatever your motivation may be) is to explain to a Nix user how Guix is better, you need to point out something that is relevant to the person you are "selling" to and is fundamentally painful with Nix and painless with Guix. And, well, reaching first thing for "Guile is the official extension language of the GNU Project" does not do your marketing effort any favors.

> So if your goal (whatever your motivation may be) is to explain to a Nix user how Guix is better

I never said that that is my goal

> another significant project that uses guile.

That looks like a typical academic project that is overwhelmingly likely to die as soon as the grants run out, what am I missing? Where are the users?

> nix is developed in cpp

Who cares?

> its own (poorly documented) dsl to interact with it

Nix documentation is not by any means ideal and is kind of scattered, but calling it "poor" is a blatant misrepresentation.

> guix is developed in guile and you use guile to interact with it > this alone implies that you get far more from just learning guile than nix dsl > if all you want to do is package management

Argument by repetition, wonderful.

> as for a one to one technical comparison, it is just a google search away

That is... not good. And when a commenter pointed out its biases and misleading generalizations, the author invited them to go listen to a stream, lol, nope.

> you keep sloganeering that guile is useless outside of guix.

That's because it is, no need to get so defensive about it. It does not detract from its technical qualities! In any case, the goalpost got moved way far from the original "Guile iS tHe OfFiCiAl eXtEnSiOn LaNgUaGe Of ThE gNu PrOjEcT", wouldn't you say?

> forgive me if i dont take your claim at face value

"Guile is for all practical purposes useless outside the Guix ecosystem" is my null hypothesis here and so far I stand by it. "Proving" that would be proving a negative, so I don't intend to even attempt that. It should, however, be fairly easy to disprove if you have data. Show us how learning Guile (or any Lisp that is not Elisp really -- sad!) is likely to be worthwhile for a "normal person" apart from using it for Guix.

if you know nix DSL but dont know cpp (whatever it means to know cpp) then the whole nix internals are just a black box to you. this is simply not the case with guix. if you cant see the benefit of guix/guile relationship here then there is not much more i can say to you

anyway as i said at the start this whole thing is just heads banging against a wall. i have no problems with you holding your views. it just happens that i disagree with them. if you expect of me to promote the virtues of lisp to you then im sorry but thats not gonna happen. you can do your own discovery. if you dont know then you dont know :)

> the whole nix internals are just a black box to you.

Yes, and just as well. Modern software is a barely-holding-together tower of abstractions as it is. Do you find yourself looking at the C source of Guile's runtime often? Or Glibc? The Linux kernel? Intel microcode? Aren't you glad you don't have to?

(Nixpkgs, on the other hand, is very accessible and many parts of it make for great reading)

> if you expect of me to promote the virtues of lisp to you then im sorry but thats not gonna happen.

No, I hope (in vain, looks like) that you'll start making some sense and stop using and then desperately defending stupid arguments.

lol so now you think that looking at nix internals is like looking at intel microde. my hat goes off to you :)

Looking at Nix internals would, over at the Guix land, be more like looking at the Guile compiler, or garbage collector -- all Nix-the-tool implements is the language and the primitive derivation machinery. Could certainly be educational, but neither is nor should be required of anyone _using_ the abstraction in question.

Do you have any more deliberate obtuseness to share, or shall we stop?

> Looking at Nix internals would, over at the Guix land, be more like looking at the Guile compiler, or garbage collector

huh? nope. looking at guix internals would just mean looking up guile documentation :)