Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video]

Post by vertex-four » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #96

vertex-four wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell is honestly a larger language, and is a pain in the butt to write. If you're just writing configuration or a very simple package, Nix is basically "JSON with colons, multiline strings, and function calls". Haskell doesn't have a reasonable built-in syntax for dictionaries/maps/whatever you want to call them, which is 95% of Nix.

A third naïve question: why not just use a functional subset of Scheme? It's got a well-defined syntax for key/value mappings, which is fast enough , funcalls, and you can use lazy evaluation if you use a pure subset of the language. And in any rnrs complient Scheme, it's fairly trivial to make a strict functional dialect. And in Guile or Racket, it's even easier. Unfortunately, Guix doesn't do this. Which meant Guix…

Post by qwertyuiop924 » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 9:31 PM UTC

davexunit wrote: post #54

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checksums!

You're missing the point.

  M-x passive-agressive-mode

Post by ramblenode » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 9:40 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #56

themartorana wrote: post #4

Anyone using NixOS as a server in production? We're on FreeBSD now but I think Linux in our stack is inevitable (many servers, like Aerospike, are Linux only). There's always Ubuntu, but this looks lovely. I've had my eye on it for a personal Linux workstation but haven't heard anything about it as a server.

If you're a non-trivial shop you'll need to harden it, you're better off with CentOS/RHEL than Ubuntu.

Post by pmahoney » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 9:44 PM UTC

corysama wrote: post #12

My Linux experience so far has been limited to ls, cd and vi. From the outside, package management has always seemed to me like a huge mess. But, I've been starting to learn Nix recently and I really like it. I can add, remove, test, screw up, change my mind, whatever without stress.

Post by Ericson2314 » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 9:57 PM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #99

Ericson2314 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I greatly respect scheme, and yet I like the nix expression language too. Scheme's claim is you shouldn't be using x more bloated language than it, but the nix expression language is smaller and simpler than Scheme; it beats it at its own game! More practically, I can't think of anything that I wanted that Scheme offers but the nix expression language doesn't.

>the nix expression language is smaller and simpler than Scheme; it beats it at its own game! It may have a smaller stdlib than scheme (but I doubt it). But it's very hard to be simpler than scheme semantically. As for what I want from scheme that nix doesn't provide, a simple, regular, syntax that I already know is what I want. I understand that that doesn't apply to everybody.

  Scheme-Simplified ::= *
  Items ::= (define (*) )
         |  (define  )
  Expr ::= ( *)
        |  (set!  )
        |  (lambda (*) )

  Nix-Expr ::=  : 
            |  with ; 
            |  { * }
            |  let * in 
            |    
            |  .
            |  .
            |   ? 
            |   ?  or 

  Nix-Item ::=  = ;
            |   = ;
            |  inherit ;
            |  inherit () ;