111–120 of 143 posts
Am I the only one who thought Guix did this better? Maybe it's just my freakish and unnatural love of parenthesis. Or my hatred of learning new configuration syntaxes (I just want to install packges, dammit! Yes, I enjoy learning new languages, but I need to get this machine up and running, and I don't want to learn your new programming language to do that)
(Don't worry, it's just a tiny toy gun.)
Am I the only one who thought Guix did this better? Maybe it's just my freakish and unnatural love of parenthesis. Or my hatred of learning new configuration syntaxes (I just want to install packges, dammit! Yes, I enjoy learning new languages, but I need to get this machine up and running, and I don't want to learn your new programming language to do that)
When I hear the words "elegant DSL", I reach for my pistol. (Don't worry, it's just a tiny toy gun.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I hear the words "elegant DSL", I reach for my pistol. (Don't worry, it's just a tiny toy gun.)
Well then, you must hate Guix and Nix equally.
Although I do think that programmers often tend to try to solve problems with the kind of tools that they like to make, rather than ones that would be appropriate for the user -- and that's why the *nix open source world has so many incompatible programming languages and configuration formats, and so few good GUIs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well then, you must hate Guix and Nix equally.
Joking, mostly... Although I do think that programmers often tend to try to solve problems with the kind of tools that they like to make, rather than ones that would be appropriate for the user -- and that's why the *nix open source world has so many incompatible programming languages and configuration formats, and so few good GUIs.
Use TOML, JSON, or YAML. If you need something general purpose, use Scheme. It works well embedded.
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.
We run a fleet. Happy to answer questions here or shoot us a mail at team@wearewizards.io if it's sensitive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
> It may have a smaller stdlib than scheme (but I doubt it). But it's very hard to be simpler than scheme semantically. Yes, I mean the semantics of the language. Scheme is indisputably more complex. There isn't really much a standard library for the Nix Expression Language either. > 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 tha…
Scheme ::= *
Expr ::=
| (*)
Atom ::=
|
|
The semantics are also simple:
A function's arguments are evaluated, bound to arguments and passed to it. A special form or macro have their arguments passed to them unevaled. In the case of a macro, the output of the macro is evaled instead. Scope is lexical.
There's about 95% of the semantics right there. The only things I left out, to my knowledge, are dynamic variables, which weren't standardized until recently.
The entire thing may be larger than Nix (I don't think it is), but more regular? I doubt it.
Am I the only one who thought Guix did this better? Maybe it's just my freakish and unnatural love of parenthesis. Or my hatred of learning new configuration syntaxes (I just want to install packges, dammit! Yes, I enjoy learning new languages, but I need to get this machine up and running, and I don't want to learn your new programming language to do that)
I really want to like NixOS, but there's a serious lack of examples of how to deploy common web infrastructure with it, and that's bitten me the few times I've tried to play with it. For example, our stack is nginx, uwsgi, django, elasticsearch, and postgres. Installing most of the pieces seemed relatively straightforward(though required a fair bit of searching through the nixpkgs source), but it's honestly pretty un…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A purely functional subset of Scheme, honestly, is different enough from most lisps that it's a new language on its own. If you're learning a new language, a new syntax isn't very hard. And there's not a terrible amount of people who think S-expressions are an inherently good syntax.
>A purely functional subset of Scheme, honestly, is different enough from most lisps that it's a new language on its own. No, it's not. It's a cut-down Scheme: Most of your scheme knowledge would apply directly, or indirectly. Besides, even if it was a different language, it's a pre-existing one: DSSSL is pretty much this. >If you're learning a new language, a new syntax isn't very hard. Yes, but for me, the choice i…
Only if you regularly write code using purely functional scheme in the first place. The difficulty of writing in a new language is very rarely figuring out what function calls to make, at least for me - it's about thinking in terms of the language.