Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Typing Nix

tweag.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 128 posts

Re: Typing Nix

#2

Post by k__ »

Nice.

Half-OT: How is the new CLI coming along? AFAIK there was an effort to make Nix usage a bit more like known from other package managers.

Re: Typing Nix

#3

Post by aban »

Neat. Somewhat related is hnix [0], a community effort in re-implementing the Nix expression language in Haskell.

While so far the focus has mostly been on implementing the expression language as is, hnix being written in Haskell could be attractive for enriching the language with fancier features:

"Because now that it's in Haskell, now that a lot of other hackers could get involved, we could do things like add optional typing to the Nix language." — J. Wiegley

For more on hnix check out Haskell Cast's Episode 13 [1] with John Wiegley.

[0]: https://github.com/jwiegley/hnix

[1]: http://www.haskellcast.com/episode/013-john-wiegley-on-categ...

Re: Typing Nix

#4

Post by b__d »

Funny: Nix is short (or colloquial) for "nichts" in German which further means "nothing" in English.

So the CTA "Get Nix" is kinda funny for German speaking people :)

PS: Greetings from Austria!

Re: Typing Nix

#5

Post by DonbunEf7 »

k__ wrote: post #2

Nice. Half-OT: How is the new CLI coming along? AFAIK there was an effort to make Nix usage a bit more like known from other package managers.

There's an effort to make Nix's CLI better, but not necessarily like other package managers.

The design is at https://gist.github.com/edolstra/efcadfd240c2d8906348

The issue is at https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/779

Re: Typing Nix

#6

Post by atemerev »

I love Nix. NixOS is my primary development operating system. However, the Nix language itself is syntactically ugly, and this proposal makes it even uglier. Parentheses, sigils and special characters (esp. semicolons) are line noise — the less of it the better.

Why they wouldn't take the most (syntactically) beautiful functional programming language out there — Standard ML? It would work perfectly for such a task. Or the second contender — Haskell. If C-like syntax is desired, the best contendant is probably Swift.

I cringe every time I have to edit a .nix file (and I have to do it a lot).

Re: Typing Nix

#8

Post by davexunit »

nosefouratyou wrote: post #7

There's also Guix in case anyone is interested. It uses Guile/Scheme for everything instead of Haskell.

I think that all the efforts to fix or re-implement the Nix language have vindicated Ludovic, the Guix maintainer, who chose an existing general-purpose language instead.

Re: Typing Nix

#9

Post by jajern »

atemerev wrote: post #6

I love Nix. NixOS is my primary development operating system. However, the Nix language itself is syntactically ugly , and this proposal makes it even uglier. Parentheses, sigils and special characters (esp. semicolons) are line noise — the less of it the better. Why they wouldn't take the most (syntactically) beautiful functional programming language out there — Standard ML? It would work perfectly for such a task.…

It's one of those languages that a developer can look at and think "Oh, so this is how non-developers see code".

Re: Typing Nix

#10

Post by agumonkey »

atemerev wrote: post #6

I love Nix. NixOS is my primary development operating system. However, the Nix language itself is syntactically ugly , and this proposal makes it even uglier. Parentheses, sigils and special characters (esp. semicolons) are line noise — the less of it the better. Why they wouldn't take the most (syntactically) beautiful functional programming language out there — Standard ML? It would work perfectly for such a task.…

You tried guix ? I still have a fondness for sexps, but ML would be nice too.
Post reply on HN