Nix Language Primer
binaryphile.com
Nix Language Primer
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Re: Nix Language Primer
#2Does 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 the couple decades people have used it as a catchall term for unix and unix-like operating systems.
Re: Nix Language Primer
#3Does 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 believe the motivation is that it eschews a lot of convenient crutches that would defeat the purpose of using nix (e.g. impurity) and adds a lot of convenient crutches that don't (e.g. a lot of implicit coercion for derivations).
Re: Nix Language Primer
#4Does 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…
The Nix thesis may give some insight: https://nixos.org/~eelco/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf
Guix's use of Guile is fundamentally equivalent to the Nix package manager's use of the Nix language, but the approach Guix takes to organizing packages is very different. IMO, the Nix language approach is cleaner and more elegant when it comes to describing packages, but it's not clear whether that's worth the cost of using a domain-specific language. So, it still remains to be seen what's the best approach.
Re: Nix Language Primer
#5Does 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 think one of the keys features is lazy evaluation. Nixpkgs is one giant expression that evaluates to the complete set of packages that it provides. But since only some the attributes of that set are evaluated in any given invocation, it's still efficient. That can be vertical (eg, a package and it's dependencies) or horizontal (eg, the names of all the packages).
Guix shows that this isn't the only way to do it, but it is a good way.
Re: Nix Language Primer
#6I'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
Re: Nix Language Primer
#7I'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?
Re: Nix Language Primer
#8I'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
Overengineered, hah. Most UX issues could be chalked up to it not doing enough!
Re: Nix Language Primer
#9I'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
How were you forced to use Nix? I didn't know anyone was using Nix in a professional environment.
Re: Nix Language Primer
#10I'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
How were you forced to use Nix? I didn't know anyone was using Nix in a professional environment.
I for one did use it professionally for years.