there's a lispy alternative to nix, called gnu guix, which uses guile/scheme instead of nix-lang.
Had never lisped before.
It seemed cool and I tried my hand with a tutorial that makes you embed guile in a C program to make it interactive. It was okay but it seemed like too much boilerplate to have to register functions individually but maybe it is standard when embedding. Never tried with lua or Janet before so I can't say.
In general there is a lack of resources, it is quite hard as a beginner to get a start with the language past playing with the repl a little.
Also tried to see if there was a Guile version of the famous SICP but ugh it was not straightforward.
I gave up. Hope Guix will foster better resources on Guile Scheme.
Knowing a Lisp in general is a significant advantage for a person who deals with writing code, IMHO. (I feel the same about regular expressions.)
There are a fair few very vocal former NixOS users who miss no opportunity to extol the benefits of Guix in the chatrooms I frequent, though. Not without merit either, I should say: the project and its UX does seem to be much more well-thought out; it's developed by GNU; the project takes software freedom seriously; many will surely enjoy hacking away at their config in Scheme. As it stands currently, though, there are more resources and it's easier to get things done with NixOS - you also get to use learn a (imo really great) packaging system that is in somewhat wide use.