undefined | Better HN

0 pointscolordrops3y ago0 comments

If you know Lisp or Haskell then Emacs and XMonad are great. If you don't, then you just get lost trying to configure them. Nix lang is a much simpler DSL with affordances like nice list syntax. It may be less powerful than lisp but it's easy to edit and (relatively) quick to learn. Similar to vimscript, which sucks, but it's amenable to easy edits for the unwashed masses.

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

0x4573y ago· 2 in thread

My issue with Nix-lang is that it's somewhere between declarative and uhm…not declarative?

Certain sections of nix files have special meaning (config), certain functions only work in those sections. Nice features like `//` for merging dicts goes out of the window as soon as you have nested dict, which is nearly every time.

It's poorly documented, “standard library” documentation is even worse. It's impossible to navigate because everything is mashed together in `nixpkgs`. Often show no examples on how to use a function and just say `it takes blahblah`, but what is blahblah?

ParetoOptimal3y ago

> Nice features like `//` for merging dicts goes out of the window as soon as you have nested dict, which is nearly every time.

Ah, so Nix needs lenses.

Edit: On the NixOS matrix I was told "there is lib.recursiveUpdate" when I mentioned your comment.

Does that fix this problem for you or improve things?

0x4573y ago

Well, yes, it fixed it when I've discovered this function a while ago. That's just an example.

That's what I'm bitching about - discovering documentation sucks because nix-lang is a very niche language and `nixpkgs.lib` is mostly undocumented. That makes finding how to do something in it is harder compared if to any other language.

With homebrew, it's just ruby scripts. You write ruby, you can ask some ruby question from someone who never wrote a formula and get an answer because that's a general purpose language.

With guix, it's not the best, but it's still just GNU Guile, it's been around for almost 30 years. Yeah, it's probably not very popular, but it's still a general purpose language that has uses outside Guix.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse