[pshirshov]

And just imagine the world where Nix has a rich powerful type system and has dedicated support global configuration flags (aka useflags, aka axes).

[digdugdirk]

Isn't there an attempt to do nixos in a different/"better" language?

[__MatrixMan__]

Nickel, glistix, and guix come to mind.

Stronger typing would be very nice for improving error messages, but many things about the nix language (e.g. recursive attribute sets) are very nicely matched to the task.