As someone who has been using asdf daily for over a year now I can say from experience it's awesome and should absolutely replace all individual language managers as the standard way we manage language versions.

I recently gave nix a try because of a hacker news comment and agree with most of the points in this comment. The fact that new users are encouraged to read not 1, but 3 separate manuals to grok the tool is extremely discouraging for new users. Also the fact that nix is currently transitioning to a new feature called flakes and deprecating channels signals to me that the ecosystem is not stable enough for me to recommend that my team at work use it right now.

That being said, I intend to read at least 2 of the manuals and use nix for dependency management in my side projects and to manage my system dependencies. I think nix takes all the great things that asdf can do, to a whole new level. The dream of having a nix section in my projects 'Getting Started' that only has 2 steps (1. Install nix 2. Run `nix-shell`) is something I desperately want.

I think nix is much like erlang in that it's incredibly powerful and solves a lot of common problems, but it's used and maintained by an old guard that went through the trouble of learning how to use it and maintains the "I did it, why can't you" mindset. The erlang ecosystem has been given new life and been made easily available to new users thanks to the awesome work done by Jose Valim and the rest of the elixir team and community. However, I really hope that it doesn't take 30 years and a new language built on top of nix for it to become accessible to everyone.

For those working on nix and the new flake functionality please look to things like elixir and asdf for inspiration on documentation, ease of use and pragmatism. Help make the tool you love ubiquitous. It will ultimately make your life easier when working with new developers because they will already have nix installed.

I intended to do everything I can to help push nix in this direction (once I understand how the hell it works) if anyone reading this, has some time on their hands and wants to improve the state of software development for everyone please go down the nix rabbit hole and try to find ways to contribute to making it more accessible.