←back to thread

Trying Guix: A Nixer's impressions

(tazj.in)
198 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | 15 Jul 25 08:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.618s | source
Show context
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.

replies(3): >>44608725 #>>44608962 #>>44609906 #
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.

replies(3): >>44608971 #>>44612433 #>>44617455 #
fake-name ◴[19 Jul 25 03:49 UTC] No.44612433[source]▶
I mean, that's a distinction without a difference.

I've not written nix, but javascript is a ugly, terrible language. It would make sense that if nix derives from it (whyyyyyy) it would also be terrible.

replies(1): >>44614105 #
1. bspammer ◴[19 Jul 25 10:05 UTC] No.44614105[source]▶
I disagree with GP, it’s much more like Haskell than JavaScript. Function application is whitespace, functions can only have one argument, everything is an expression, let blocks are the way you define and scope variables. I see very little relation to JavaScript at all, to be honest.
replies(1): >>44619679 #
2. otabdeveloper4 ◴[19 Jul 25 21:40 UTC] No.44619679[source]▶
You've listed syntactic sugar, not anything about the actual language.
replies(1): >>44623765 #
3. bspammer ◴[20 Jul 25 10:36 UTC] No.44623765[source]▶
I don't see any sense where syntactic sugar is not part of the language. I don't really care about how it works behind the scenes, the syntax is the part that I touch as a programmer.