If nixos used a different language (e.g. gluon), do you think you would have become more comfortable quicker?
I think the problem is more about documentation and expectations:
- Nix only has a small number of builtins. A lot of useful functions are in nixpkgs. As a consequence, you often have to look in two places to find if there is an existing function that does what you want to do. Added to that, some functions are undocumented and can only be discovered through the REPL or by reading the relevant nixpkgs sources. Then some functions do have documentation, but the documentation is very terse, does not contain good examples, etc. I think things would be clearer if Nix had a documented standard library and nixpkgs would only be focused on providing package derivations and NixOS modules.
- Expectation-wise: I think a lot of people do not expect to have to learn a new language when starting to use a package manager and/or distribution. This leads to treating derivations akin to RPM spec files (which is what I did in the beginning), which becomes frustrating very quickly.
Disclaimer: I am by no means a Nix expert. These are my observations from learning Nix myself since last year.
Many functional languages have lazy evaluation, and they do provide benefits. However, unfortunately, this concept has leaked into other areas of programming. In particular, many database ORMs use lazy evaluation to pull data. In one step, you create a database query, then pass that off to another function or class. Then, when it's off in another package and evaluated the query is made.
The main problem with lazy evaluation of database queries is that it treats a database evaluation like normal code, even though under the hood there may be network access, caching, and if you're not careful duplicative database pulls.
Generally, there should be a rule in programming languages that when you make a network call, the programmer has clear visibility into when that is happening. Hiding it with fancy syntax is more of a negative than a positive.
