Every time I’ve used a declarative system at work I either eventually become one of the experts and we all have lines outside our door of people who just don’t get it, or I replace it with something imperative so we can all get some fucking peace.

Ant was by far the most stressful. I had to cyberstalk James Duncan Davidson to understand what he was thinking. The mental model for the tool wasn’t in the docs. It was in forum posts spread across three+ different websites. And it was slightly insane. First writer wins broke everyone’s brains across three jobs before someone helped me kill it and replace it with something else.

It’s also a cornerstone of my thesis: never trust software someone says they wrote on an airplane. That’s not enough time to create a good solution, and any decision you make while experiencing altitude sickness is sketchy. (Prior to 2010, airline passengers were experiencing 8000 ft atmosphere on every flight. One of the selling points of the 787 was 5000 ft equivalent pressure)

> It also doesn't help that the community is still fighting over whether flakes should be a thing.

Could you elaborate on what the debate is? Haven't heard of this before!

I agree with that. But that can be attemped to be solved by wrapping Nix with a better UX instead of building something from scratch.