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Typing Nix

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Re: Typing Nix

#11

Post by geokon »

davexunit wrote: post #8
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.

Except GUIX is more of a political project and part of the GNU "stack". It's a noble goal and I think it's great they're doing it. (It's people doing work on their spare time, so more power to them!)

But I wonder if that will help or hinder it in the end. It's also unclear to me what Guile brings other than fracturing the Scheme/Lisp/Racket community further (there are other Schemes that are older, seemingly just as clean, and often more powerful). Seems like mostly NIMBYism, but I might be offbase

Re: Typing Nix

#12

Post by mguijarr »

How does Nix compare with conda[0] ? I could not find any useful resource, in my team we were hesitating between the two, for packages management ; finally we went for conda because it (seems)is better documented and package description is easier to write for newbies. And also we are a Python shop, so other devs felt more comfortable with conda. Personally I prefer Nix, though, and I wanted to advocate for it but the only main difference I could find is that Nix sits on top of the kernel (including libc...) whereas conda uses the system libc.

[0]: https://conda.io

Re: Typing Nix

#13

Post by KitDuncan »

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.…

Honestly that's the only thing that keeps me from jumping to NixOS. I don't want to learn a weird language, I'll never use for anything else, just to maintain my OS.

Re: Typing Nix

#14

Post by regnat »

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.…

Hi, author here. While I agree that the language could be improved, I wonder why you say that this makes it uglier, and how you'd imagine a better solution (this is still in development, and any idea is welcome).

Re: Typing Nix

#15

Post by atemerev »

regnat wrote: post #14
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.…

Hi, author here. While I agree that the language could be improved, I wonder why you say that this makes it uglier, and how you'd imagine a better solution (this is still in development, and any idea is welcome).

Is there any option to break source-level compatibility? (Automatic translation to old syntax will still be possible and seamless, of course).

If yes, I can draft a proposal.

Re: Typing Nix

#16

Post by joombaga »

jajern wrote: post #9
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".

It looks like someone threw a pinch of erlang in a Chef recipe. Like bash, but every English word operator has been replaced by space ships, angry squids, ternary operators, && all the other things that make code hard to read.

But... I still love Nix, and you get used to it.

Re: Typing Nix

#17

Post by atemerev »

agumonkey wrote: post #10
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.

I need CUDA drivers for what I am working with, and I have found no way to install it in Guix. Otherwise, it looks interesting enough.

(Sexps are usually not my first choice, I think it is a "lazy option" for people who do not want to write parsers / design their own syntax. Even then, they are better than current Nix expressions).

Re: Typing Nix

#18

Post by atemerev »

joombaga wrote: post #16
jajern wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It looks like someone threw a pinch of erlang in a Chef recipe. Like bash, but every English word operator has been replaced by space ships, angry squids, ternary operators, && all the other things that make code hard to read. But... I still love Nix, and you get used to it.

Bash is still worse. Probably. I know it is ubiquitous, but if I can avoid writing Bash scripts, I do.

Re: Typing Nix

#19

Post by dtwhitney »

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.…

I could not agree with you more! I use nix daily, and every time I go to edit it a nix file a voice in the back of my head says, "you should really start that Haskell to Nix compiler you've been thinking about." [edit] ha! just notice the next comment talking about hnix. Great minds... :)

Re: Typing Nix

#20

Post by regnat »

atemerev wrote: post #15
regnat wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, author here. While I agree that the language could be improved, I wonder why you say that this makes it uglier, and how you'd imagine a better solution (this is still in development, and any idea is welcome).

Is there any option to break source-level compatibility? (Automatic translation to old syntax will still be possible and seamless, of course). If yes, I can draft a proposal.

Unfortunately no, except maybe for some very minor tweaks that have a chance to be included in vanilla nix, but otherwise this would most probably either mean the death of this project or a split in the (already small) community, which I both don't want to see
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