[otabdeveloper4]

Two problems:

a) Unless you literally write everything in one language, you will have to deal with learning, supporting and fixing bugs in N different package/environment managers instead of just one.

b) If you have a project that uses several languages (say, a Python webapp with C++ extensions and frontend templates in Typescript), then Nix is the only solution that will integrate this mess under one umbrella.

[corethree]

a. Using nix in place of a package manager means dealing with libraries specific to that language. It's still managing different apis. And more potential for bugs and unforeseen problems in custom 3rd party APIs as opposed to the official one. Admit it, you hit tons of problems getting everything to work fine with python.

b. C++ is the only one that would benefit from nix here because C++ dependencies are usually installed externally. There's no folder with all the external sources in the project. Even so this can be achieved with docker. If you want you can have docker call some other scripting language to install everything if you want "one language" which is essentially what you're doing with nix.

[otabdeveloper4]

a. you hit tons of problems getting everything to work fine with python - of course, but the maintenance burden is an order of magnitude lower than integrating all this manually.

b. No, docker is not a solution. Docker is another problem and a separate maintenance nightmare.

(Nix solves maintenance problems at scale, Docker explodes them exponentially. I would not ever recommend using Docker for anything except personal computing devices you don't care about.)

[yeck]

I agree.

There are many python packages that have other dependencies not managed by Python package management. The pain of figuring out what those implicit dependencies are is effectively removed for users when configured as a nix shell.