[shubber]

Put another way, I would think that individual engineers would be better off learning the underlying tech and the tools provided that go with them. I think it's very possible that Flox (or devenv or...) reaches EOL, or ceases to track nixpkgs appropriately, or any of the other ways that software rots. Where nix develop is going to last as long as Nix Flakes do, and there's incentive to provide a migration path to whatever's next.

Even more important: every abstraction is going to leak. Maybe the Flox CLI "looks" cleaner or whatever, but in the end you'll still need to learn Nix to use it effectively. Why learn twice as much stuff as you need?

[pxc]

I use Nix at work, to distribute tools to (among other places) developers outside my team. I'm also the person within my team who knows Nix best.

We're currently using devenv.sh to present a prettier interface to those users, who are developers. I don't expect those devs to learn much about Nix, but I do expect to some extent to be responsible for educating and supporting them as issues inevitably come up.

I've not really tried Flox (now that I can do so without any signups and the CLI tool is open-source, I'm more seriously tempted to dig in than before!). But for me, the proposition isn't really learning 2 things vs. 1 or even asking other people to do so. The question is which interface is going to be easier for me to support— my expectation is that if/when things go awry, I'll end up relying on the same Nix knowledge either way. So I don't really see Flox changing what the developers I support are expected to master, but if Flox is something that developers I support find convenient and pleasant to use, I can imagine it reducing UX and documentation work I have to do with the Nix-based tooling I'm gluing together. It may also save me infrastructure burdens, in terms of setting up shared binary caches or helping users share environment configs and Nix code.

I'd really love to support a developer so obsessive and curious that they felt the need to learn and master Nix because they were using Flox as a dependency of my project. I'd like to think that as someone who knows my way around the Nix ecosystem, I could make exploring how Nix works and how Flox adds to it fun for them. But I can also imagine being that developer and feeling annoyed at the prospect of 'having' to learn two tools. I hear that.

[joshcsimmons]

Does a python developer NEED to know how C works to write automation scripts that work reasonably well? This logic is silly.

[pxc]

They don't, but I have respect and sympathy for developers who prefer to dig deeper with learning their tools, and how that might make them tend to prefer stacks with fewer layers sometimes. I think it's a valid concern, especially for hobbyist and experimental/autodidactic use cases. In a corporate environment or within a team, people typically specialize and defer to each other in various areas, so maybe it matters less there.