Trying Guix: A Nixer's impressions

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.

> Nix-the-language is the worst programming language I've ever had the misfortune to interact with.

I feel the same.

The multi-line strings and string interpolation are both really nice. Unfortunately a lot of the text being munged is bash and usually already ugly, so the result is double-ugly.

The functional aspects are okay. However, as an expression language and being primarily used in a declarative way, it is frequent to have almost no idea what's going on in Nix. Reading the code and understanding the evaluation are extremely far apart.

callPackage... It's something I thought would be cool in a language until I actually experienced the depth of disorientation it can cause.

The remaining syntax has a lot of "but why?" where it just seems to do its own thing relative to other languages, which makes it harder to get into a rhythm.

Some of the subject matter is the real culprit. The cross compiling sliding window thing... I've studied it several times. If I had to actually do something with it, straight to the LLM. Compilers have targets.

> The remaining syntax has a lot of "but why?" where it just seems to do its own thing relative to other languages

Like what?

My list of Nix language nits is relatively small, would like to understand.

One thing that seems under-developed is smart merging. There is // at language level, but then if you want datatype-specific merging, you use functions. That itself is just the power of functional programming. But as it is with untyped languages, you end up doing the same thing slightly different in several places, and a fractal of accidental complexity starts to appear.