I've had the displeasure of being forced to use nix and to me it seems like an overengineered piece of garbage. I don't see why anyone should use this vs competitors
Please elaborate.
Nix Language Primer
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Re: Nix Language Primer
#12I've had the displeasure of being forced to use nix and to me it seems like an overengineered piece of garbage. I don't see why anyone should use this vs competitors
Would you mind elaborating? Who would you say are the competitors? I completely agree it's a waste to over complicate things if you never leverage it, but Nix seems like the perfect solution to a problem I can't imagine I'm the only one to have. Being able to build against different versions of glibc and a whole stack of dependencies out of the box is kind of amazing after dealing with dependencies. Flipping between version stacks by flipping a symlink is insane.
Re: Nix Language Primer
#13Does anyone know the rationale for creating Nixlang? Guix's use of Scheme proves there isn't a novel feature unavailable elsewhere, so it seems like a lot of wasted effort to implement a language that will likely only ever be used for one suite of programs. (And tooling; though almost none exists now, making the choice even more expensive.) I've tried to find one, but "nix" is a difficult thing to google for given th…
I like Scheme, but I think a lot of people actually wouldn’t want to write their packages and OS configuration files as S-expressions.
Nix is an extremely simple language with quite familiar syntax, a kind of JSON with functions and string interpolation.
Note also that Guix uses Scheme a lot more deeply than Nix uses the Nix language, in the sense that Nix uses e.g. shell scripts where Guix uses Scheme statements. Actual “coding” in the Nix language is relatively rare.
Re: Nix Language Primer
#14There is also https://jsonnet.org/
Re: Nix Language Primer
#15I've had the displeasure of being forced to use nix and to me it seems like an overengineered piece of garbage. I don't see why anyone should use this vs competitors
Huh. I think this is the first bad experience with NIX I've ever heard on HN. Having only ever heard about it in passing but never worked with it myself I'm curious, what were you building when you'd encountered it and what issues did you have. Was there a particular language you'd preferred to have worked in?
> Huh. I think this is the first bad experience with NIX I've ever heard on HN.
Strictly speaking "Nix" may refer to two things, and I'm not sure which thing either of you are referring to, nor if you two are referring to the same thing.
Personally I found the nix package-manager a bit odd, but to me that was not a deal-breaker for trying out NixOS. The bigeset problem for me was lacking packages... I was however willing to help the community out by trying to package the things I needed which wasn't already provided for.
But then I had to use the Nix language. And that was a great displeasure, and I ended giving up NixOS all together because of this one pain point.
And to address your comment: I think I've seen similar comments on HN at regular intervals. It's definitely not a one-off comment.
If they had used another more standard language (like LISP!) I would probably still be on NixOS as my main OS.
In the long run, I really hope Guix manages to get something good going. My biggest concern for Guix is that they will restrict the available packages by being overly zealous about package-licensing (like everything the FSF does).
Re: Nix Language Primer
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. I think this is the first bad experience with NIX I've ever heard on HN. Having only ever heard about it in passing but never worked with it myself I'm curious, what were you building when you'd encountered it and what issues did you have. Was there a particular language you'd preferred to have worked in?
> Huh. I think this is the first bad experience with NIX I've ever heard on HN. Strictly speaking "Nix" may refer to two things, and I'm not sure which thing either of you are referring to, nor if you two are referring to the same thing. Personally I found the nix package-manager a bit odd, but to me that was not a deal-breaker for trying out NixOS. The bigeset problem for me was lacking packages... I was however wil…
But then I had to use the Nix language. And that was a great displeasure, and I ended giving up NixOS all together because of this one pain point.
Could you articulate why? I have only been using Nix for ~3 months, but so far I do not really have qualms with the Nix language. Maybe it is because I have written a fair bit of Haskell before.
(Of course, I understand the argument that it would have been more comfortable if an existing language like Scheme was used.)
My biggest concern for Guix is that they will restrict the available packages by being overly zealous a bout package-licensing (like everything the FSF does).
Same here. When I got interested in NixOS/GuixSD I seriously considered using GuixSD, because Scheme is more familiar. But there are just some proprietary packages that I need for work (Skype) and at home. I didn't really feel like having to rely on third-party repositories, etc.
Re: Nix Language Primer
#17Why the need for another new language? Why not just use Guile or Scheme instead?
Re: Nix Language Primer
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Huh. I think this is the first bad experience with NIX I've ever heard on HN. Strictly speaking "Nix" may refer to two things, and I'm not sure which thing either of you are referring to, nor if you two are referring to the same thing. Personally I found the nix package-manager a bit odd, but to me that was not a deal-breaker for trying out NixOS. The bigeset problem for me was lacking packages... I was however wil…
But then I had to use the Nix language. And that was a great displeasure, and I ended giving up NixOS all together because of this one pain point. Could you articulate why? I have only been using Nix for ~3 months, but so far I do not really have qualms with the Nix language. Maybe it is because I have written a fair bit of Haskell before. (Of course, I understand the argument that it would have been more comfortable…
> Could you articulate why? I have only been using Nix for ~3 months, but so far I do not really have qualms with the Nix language.
I mean... It's not a "real" language in the sense that there exists any tooling, debuggers, unit-test suites or anything.
You write your recipes and try to see if they work. And when they don't you have no idea why.
With a real programming language (like Scheme) I could evaluate something working, compare it to my non-working stuff and probably figure out where it all went wrong. Chances are I could probably expand the macros and debug my way to a solution right within Emacs without ever launching a single external tool.
There's just this huge gap between what you get and what you expect. And with Nix being a one-tricky pony, there's almost zero incentives for the community at large to try bridge that gap.
Re: Nix Language Primer
#19Does anyone know the rationale for creating Nixlang? Guix's use of Scheme proves there isn't a novel feature unavailable elsewhere, so it seems like a lot of wasted effort to implement a language that will likely only ever be used for one suite of programs. (And tooling; though almost none exists now, making the choice even more expensive.) I've tried to find one, but "nix" is a difficult thing to google for given th…
I like Scheme, but I think a lot of people actually wouldn’t want to write their packages and OS configuration files as S-expressions. Nix is an extremely simple language with quite familiar syntax, a kind of JSON with functions and string interpolation. Note also that Guix uses Scheme a lot more deeply than Nix uses the Nix language, in the sense that Nix uses e.g. shell scripts where Guix uses Scheme statements. Ac…
For me personally, as a person who's tried Nix, it's helpful that the Nix language is simple, self contained and easy to learn & grok quickly. I never learnt Scheme, and its use in Guix, though extremely interesting and appealing in theory, also feels notably overwhelming to me. That I'd have to learn a whole (presumably huge) R7RS or something, just to be able to use Guix. And then still have to learn the Guix "API" or DSL over that to be able to actually use it. While the Nix language is small and fully described in the Nix manual, in surprisingly few words.
Re: Nix Language Primer
#20I've had the displeasure of being forced to use nix and to me it seems like an overengineered piece of garbage. I don't see why anyone should use this vs competitors
Why would anyone use it versus its competitors? Here's why:
1. You can uninstall a thing and it will no longer affect your computer.
2. Your environment will work the same way on your colleague's computer.
3. Your environment will work the same way years down the line.
4. Your environment will probably work the same way years down the line, even after you've applied security updates. If it doesn't, it will probably be clear what's broken/different.
5. You can install many different environments on the same machine, and they will probably all work. On the rare occasions where they don't, it will be because they interact with system services or limited system resources, and it will be clearly defined how that happens.
6. All this is true across most programming languages, system services, and all sorts of tools.
7. You can combine this with direnv (or direnv-mode for Emacs) to make it so that you can just cd into a directory and magically get all the dependencies.
8. You can put the recipe for your environment in Git.
Other than Nix and Guix, I don't know of any tool where these things are true. Docker and Virtual Machines get sort of half way, but tend to rot over time.
But yes, it's difficult to learn and in many cases the usability is poor.
Final bonus point:
9. Nix is so good that it can even make Autotools work correctly.