Well this is enough to put anyone off Nix. Such a shame because the abstract idea is obviously a good one. But every time Nix/NixOS comes up the story is the same.
Terrible UX. Terrible documentation.
Is Guix any better?
Terrible UX. Terrible documentation.
Is Guix any better?
Those constraints don't really apply if you have admin control of your machine.
(And the troubles in the first half were caused by zealously diving deeper with Nix, after an initial simple setup went well).
I installed it on Debian, and there's no uninstall. Sure, at that point I was already frustrated, but IMHO that's just a sample. It wasn't for me.
The excellent Arch Linux Wiki demonstrates that high-quality community-maintained docs are possible.
In reality Nix is a programming language. It is a relatively simple language, but it is also functional and lazily evalated. And while the language is simple, its stdlib (nixpkgs) is actually puts another abstraction layer on top of it which is quite complex.
I do think though that Nix should do the same thing other programming languages do: identify what the nix stdlib is, move it to a separate repo with its own release schedule and ensure that whatever is added to it/removed from it is documented.
This won't help author of this blog, but it would be a great help for anyone who is willing to go through Nix Pills.
Personally I loathe DSLs unless you genuinely need something really fast and really simple. Otherwise please just pick something off the shelf and save everyone the headache.
The Nix language is functional and lazily evaluated, it closely matches how Nix works builds packages, which basically makes it less verbose.
Even if they used python (or python like language like starlark), and then proceed to build an abstractions on top of it, barely documenting the function. Leaving old ones with the new ones, you would still be confused and frustrated needing to look at the source code.