The future of software is Nix in the same sense that the future of software was Bitkeeper. 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 th…
There are also quite a few attempts at "Nix without NixLang". In the ecosystem, I can think of Nickel (a different configuration language, but one with strong typing), Garn (Nix but using TypeScript), and Guix (Nix but using Scheme, and also kind of an ecosystem fork I think?). The common link behind all of them is that they all still have Nix in their DNA, i.e. using a Nix store with Nix derivations under the hood O…
What we probably need, long term, is a content addressable store, local first, secure, and freely shareable. Layering this on top of POSIX filesystems feels awkward and difficult to trust. But this is the fundamental building block of Nix-like systems and would make the move from rootless to system-wide a mostly trivial exercise.