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Comment by sterlind | Hacker News Reader

> Not really. Nix is not a tool, it's a toolkit for making your own tools. Very much in the vein of Unix, shell, etc

even tools for tools should be ergonomic to use. the Nix language server should have autocomplete, searches and interacting with the language should be easy, etc. and nearly everyone needs to hunt for packages, even if they're not "installing" them - they might be needed for the toolchain.

Nix is like early Git. all the raw power is there, but little of the porcelain. it's so much better than anything before it that we accept the pain of dealing with exposed plumbing, but we shouldn't get used to it.

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The last two years have seen an increased focus on usability, education and polish now that after circa 15 years of establishing solid foundations are in place. All good things in time.

There’s no venture backed cash here paying for the polish that folks typically see in devtools launched in 2023. That polish is expensive to do and isn’t “fun or engaging” for the majority of developers thus classic open source problem of over indexing on serving the needs/existing people who do not need the polish.

There’s some notable call-outs here of folks putting in serious effort such as https://nix.dev ala https://cachix.org out of love for nix to succeed.

Yeah nix wants to grow, and it is, largest bazaar GitHub community/repo out there right now.

starting to see venture backed companies forming who are building the polish as porcelain over the top and giving back. see https://floxdev.com/

at this stage nix is a damn safe bet because of what it can do, the problems it solves and the size of community.

> at this stage nix is a damn safe bet because of what it can do, the problems it solves and the size of community.

In the last few years, Nix has gone from a place where I was sometimes uncomfortable recommending it to people to one where I feel like it would be unstrategic not to use it where it fits. If you know Nix today, you should be pushing it at your company wherever you can see a good use case.

> In the last few years, Nix has gone from a place where I was sometimes uncomfortable recommending it to people to one where I feel like it would be unstrategic not to use it.

Super agree. Been using nix now for six(?) years and always been advocating for it but hesentiant to recommend companies adopt it (unless you can use it to attract talent as walmart did with nodejs back in the day) however with https://devenv.sh and https://nix.dev in the existence the time to amaze is now measured in < 5 minutes. nixpkgs also partially solves sbom topics, enables monkey patching any linux application/kernel/ffi dependency, has the freshest collection of packages (it's more fresh than archlinux by a major factor) whilst all being under CI/CD (shamefully rare in linux land)

At flox, we are specifically focusing on those people who are the advocates and bringing Nix into their organizations, teams, and companies. We call them the “Ambassadors”, and want to call out how important that role is in making Nix mainstream. Ideally, it should become the obvious choice - the default choice - where specific reasons need to be provided when not using it.

I'm just saying that like Git and shell people will eventually make their own porcelain for a myriad different use cases. Most of those will probably be buried in some corporate proprietary repo.

Should? By whose standard?

Also nix does have some autocomplete, check out Nil…

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