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Trying Guix: A Nixer's impressions

(tazj.in)
194 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 15 Jul 25 08:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.425s | source
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peterldowns ◴[18 Jul 25 19:08 UTC] No.44608614[source]▶
Very interesting writeup, as a long-time Nix user I've always been interested in trying guix but never gotten around to it. Great post overall.

> The thing is, I'm not actually sure if Guix's better documentation helps smooth the onboarding in any way because you have to already know Scheme, which is a more complex language than Nix.

LMAO absolutely not. Nix-the-language is the worst programming language I've ever had the misfortune to interact with. I picked up Scheme in about 1 day during a class in college. It's night-and-day different.

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otabdeveloper4 ◴[18 Jul 25 19:18 UTC] No.44608725[source]▶
> Nix-the-language is the worst programming language I've ever had the misfortune to interact with

Nix-the-language is just a subset of Javascript with built-in laziness and a slightly different syntax. An absolute bog-standard and mainstream way of thinking about programs in 2025.

That said, Nix-the-language also suffers from all the same birth defects that manifest themselves in frontend development.

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1. grep_name ◴[18 Jul 25 19:42 UTC] No.44608971[source]▶
> That said, Nix-the-language also suffers from all the same birth defects that manifest themselves in frontend development

That must be it. The GP's comment really resonated with me, in that learning scheme felt like no task at all whereas I STILL feel uncomfortable with the nix programming language and ecosystem despite using nixOS exclusively on my personal laptop for two years and on my work machine for about half a year now. I've always fumbled over frontend / javascript development though, and avoid it as much as I can at work although I still end up working in it every year or so.

Nix only won out for me because of the mac compatibility, without which I can't really use it at work

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2. 0x457 ◴[19 Jul 25 04:58 UTC] No.44612712[source]▶
I think nix-the-language is pretty simple and easy to learn language. It's visually hard to parse and a lot of syntax decisions make you wonder, but it's not the worst.

The problem is that you're very rarely exposed to it directly. You are always multiple layers of abstractions away from it. Most of these layers are completely undocumented.