> “Can I tell you about our lord and saviour Nix?”
The "just use Nix" people are just like the "write it in Rust" brigade.
And the things both groups promote share exactly the same problem ...
A stupidly enormous learning curve.
That's why your average person prefers to just the job done in a container vs Nix, or in Go vs Rust.
I'm sure Nix is awesome, just like I'm sure Rust is awesome. But honestly, I've got enough going on in my brain at $work and $home without having to wrangle some obscure config syntax (Nix) or obscure low-level language complexities (e.g. Rust's infamous borrow-checker).
Every time I go back and look at Rust or Nix my brain is just like .... no, thanks.
Rust forces you to consider things upfront, or to put it another way, a C developer does what the borrow checker does manually. Sometimes, they do it after asan/ubsan/tsan has reported the issue. Sometimes it's after a segfault. Usually it's after the user hits the bug already.
Nix similarly forced issues to be reasoned with upfront.
Yes and most people are happier with a garbage collector than using C, C++ or Rust. There are domains or projects where you have to use one of those languages, but Rust is being used and promoted far outside those niches.
> Complexity for the sake of complexity is not a goal everyone should be striving for.
THIS !
Go's well maintained stdlib just lets me get on with it.
With Rust meanwhile, I have to decide which of thousands of third-party Rust crates is sufficiently en-vogue and well maintained.
Most of my coding work is backend stuff that calls a lot of HTTP APIs, parses a lot of JSON and does a lot of crypto. All that is ready-to-go "out of the box" with Go stdlib and on top of that is faster to get to production in Go than in Rust.
I don't need or want Rust's complexity. As I said I have enough going on at $work...
I think LLMs have solved that for Nix. I recently moved my homelab from an Ansible/Debian setup to NixOS. As long as I understand at a high level what Nix is and what problems it solves, I can let the LLM deal with the configuration language.
I didn’t say “just use Nix”, I jokingly made a reference to street evangelists and the similarities they have in their approach with people who are excited about a particular technology. In fact I said “Nix or otherwise” implying there are many options when it comes to reproducible per-project environments.
joking or not, people are very tired of the evangelists (fanbois?) from these ecosystems, and this culture around them is one reason others stay away. The broader trend is developers are burnt out on tooling churn
That's a fine opinion to have. You just have to fight a separate shoggoth of a mutable-root system, which mainstream Linux vendors like Google and Valve have avoided.
It's similar to the Rust situation in that many Rust programmers are simply tired C++ programmers fed-up with using Valgrind and Cmake. Nix is the retirement-home for people who clean up package pollution and just want stability at any cost.
The "just use Nix" people are just like the "write it in Rust" brigade.
And the things both groups promote share exactly the same problem ...
A stupidly enormous learning curve.
That's why your average person prefers to just the job done in a container vs Nix, or in Go vs Rust.
I'm sure Nix is awesome, just like I'm sure Rust is awesome. But honestly, I've got enough going on in my brain at $work and $home without having to wrangle some obscure config syntax (Nix) or obscure low-level language complexities (e.g. Rust's infamous borrow-checker).
Every time I go back and look at Rust or Nix my brain is just like .... no, thanks.