alt Hacker NewsVery interesting writeup, as a long-time Nix user I've always been interested in trying guix but never gotten around to it. Great post overall.
> The thing is, I'm not actually sure if Guix's better documentation helps smooth the onboarding in any way because you have to already know Scheme, which is a more complex language than Nix.
LMAO absolutely not. Nix-the-language is the worst programming language I've ever had the misfortune to interact with. I picked up Scheme in about 1 day during a class in college. It's night-and-day different.
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> Nix-the-language is the worst programming language I've ever had the misfortune to interact with
Nix-the-language is just a subset of Javascript with built-in laziness and a slightly different syntax. An absolute bog-standard and mainstream way of thinking about programs in 2025.
That said, Nix-the-language also suffers from all the same birth defects that manifest themselves in frontend development.
I gotta admit, I stopped reading when I saw nix with scheme. If it was scheme plus nix and it was sorted, I might have continued.
> Nix-the-language is the worst programming language I've ever had the misfortune to interact with.
I feel the same.
The multi-line strings and string interpolation are both really nice. Unfortunately a lot of the text being munged is bash and usually already ugly, so the result is double-ugly.
The functional aspects are okay. However, as an expression language and being primarily used in a declarative way, it is frequent to have almost no idea what's going on in Nix. Reading the code and understanding the evaluation are extremely far apart.
callPackage... It's something I thought would be cool in a language until I actually experienced the depth of disorientation it can cause.
The remaining syntax has a lot of "but why?" where it just seems to do its own thing relative to other languages, which makes it harder to get into a rhythm.
Some of the subject matter is the real culprit. The cross compiling sliding window thing... I've studied it several times. If I had to actually do something with it, straight to the LLM. Compilers have targets.