[mplanchard]

Personally I think a bigger problem is the lack of discoverability of things in nixpkgs, which hits you as soon as you start writing anything remotely non-trivial. "Things" here means functions in 'lib', 'builtins', etc., as well as common idioms for solving various problems. I think this combines with the language's lack of types to make it hard to know what you can write, much less what you should write.

A language server with autocomplete and jump-to-definition would go a long way to making nix more accessible. As it stands, I generally have to clone nixpkgs locally and grep through it for definitions or examples of things related to what I'm doing, in order to figure out how they're used and to try to understand the idioms, even with 4 years of running NixOS under my belt and 3 years of using it for dev environments and packaging at work.