11–20 of 64 posts
Cool! I'm glad somebody is working on this. What's your business model?
It was readily apparent to anyone using Bitkeeper that this was the right way for version control software to work. Similarly, the Nix model is clearly correct.
But just as Bitkeeper was a clumsy early attempt at implementing that paradigm, so is Nix. The article says that "Nix is declarative" which could not be further from the truth. It has a confusing and awkward language with multiple ways of accomplishing the same task, twisting concepts like "function" and "struct" into confusing knots that make it difficult to follow. Debugging is nearly impossible, and even test evaluations take a lot of work to get right. It is riddled with conventions and "helpers" that have idiomatic forms that are not well-documented and frequently abused.
But the model is RIGHT. This is the way to distribute software, this is the way to write software, this is the way to ensure hermetic distributions, this is the way to avoid global implicit state. And Nix as a proof of concept is great because it shows that it does work (basically).
So what is the path forward? Kill the language and replace it with configuration, with external scripts to do the heavy lifting. Make mutations of the data model the fundamental operations rather than having an intentional CLI that conceals the underlying functionality. So make it less usable but more understandable (like the path that Git took) and iterate from there.
Is there a good book that describes everything we need to know?
Hey folks CEO of Determinate Systems, and the author of the blog post. I'd be glad to answer questions about the post and what we're doing!
I am a Windows user. The default nix implementation does not support Windows. How can the future of software leave out one of the largest platforms on the planet?
Well. The future isn't evenly distributed yet :). There is work in flight to make Nix support Windows. Also, and I know this doesn't count, but it works great in WSL today.
It's not going to be the future of anything if it doesn't get much better documentation.
Is there a good book that describes everything we need to know?
https://nix.dev/ is pretty good for getting started these days.
I really like Nix package management. I really hate Nix configuration management. I already know how to configure everything. I don't want to have to figure out whatever abstracted config options some random package maintainer decided on.
As Nix (and NixOS) becomes more widely used, this is one place where we'll have to find a way to let users do what they know how, and stop getting in the way.
What about immutable systems like Fedora Atomic?