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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

> But that's a matter of improving the documentation or maybe fixing one or two superficial problems on the language.

Based on a quick check of their Wikipedia page, Nix has been around for 15 years, since 2007.

So those for sure look like structural problems. I don't know which ones exactly, but paraphrasing Tolstoi, popular software products are popular in much the same way, while unpopular ones are unpopular in their own unique ways.

In my experience almost no open source project that hasn't entered the mainstream in its first 10 years manages to turn the ship around, unless it lucks into a major change of environment. Programming languages are sometimes exempt if they have a "killer" library or framework pop up.

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Nix just got a huge overhaul, with most functionality getting bundle under a single easy to use 'nix' command (i.e. similar to 'apt'), rendering a lot of the old commands obsolete. That currently creates a bit of a confusing situation, as lots of docu is about old commands, while new commands that look similar can behave quite a bit different (e.g. 'nix-shell' != 'nix shell'). Nix Flakes are another new thing and also create a bit of confusion and ugliness (e.g. packages being named 'nixpkgs#legacyPackages.x86_64-linux...').

That said, I haven't found Nix hard to use, quite the opposite. The new 'nix' command is pretty self explanatory, it's just a little incomplete in spots. And the Nix language is quite simple and easy to understand if you have ever touched a functional language. Compared to all the other Linux stuff I have played with over the years, it was a very pleasant experience so far.

Nix ain't trying to win marketshare it's trying to be amazing. But it takes guts to be amazing and that means a lot of people don't manage to use Nix.

HN tends to see success in terms of adoption rate & ranking. Nix is on another plane. It's beyond critical mass. And for people like me, it is a huge force multiplier. But I had to grind my way to the point where that is true.

I tend to not bother selling people on it. People who want what Nix does will find it at some point. So I just focus on using Nix myself in a world of worse tools. Feels great.

Oh, I'm not selling these cars. No, no. These babies sell themselves.

The difference between the person you're replying to and a car salesman is that they're a user and not a salesman.

Well, Nix is mainstream.

Evidence of that is that you can just talk about it by name here on HN without explaining what it is.

That could just as easily be attributed to the word Nix being easy to search for. But even if everyone on HN is aware of what it is, that doesn't make it mainstream by any definition I can think of. There are countless examples in the world of things that most people (in a given audience) are aware of, but that almost none of them participate in.

Is Haskell mainstream? What about committing murder?

Your claim is that software doesn't go from non-mainstream into popular if it stays non-mainstream for a decade. I'm really not willing to discuss the definition of "mainstream", but there are plenty of cases of software that stayed a decade as "everybody knows it, nobody uses it" and eventually got popular.

It is horrible searching for Nix stuff because of all the *nix stuff.

And yes, this is 100% Nix's fault

COBOL is mainstream?

> Well, Nix is mainstream. Evidence of that is that you can just talk about it by name here on HN without explaining what it is.

I would say that HN is far from mainstream.

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