Thu 30 Mar 17 − 00:23, Jeaye(cont...@jeaye.com) a écrit: > Congrats on the funding!
Thanks :) > As someone who's been looking for more static validation of my Nix > expressions, this is an exciting change. I must admit, however, that I wonder > if Nix is just not the "right" tool for the job. I didn't see anyone else in > this thread mention it, to my surprise, so I'll bite: if you have some > funding and some time, why not integrate an existing language, with a > working, mature, static type system instead? > > This is where I think Guix made a better choice: many people already know > Scheme and are comfortable with it. If Haskell, for example, has the kind of > type system we're seeking, what benefit do we get for sticking with Nix? Only > the sunken cost? > > If it isn't clear, I think that purely functional package management is a > wonderful thing, but I don't think a new (Nix) language is the best way to > use it. I don't think a dedicated (and new) language is a bad think because nixpkgs is a quite hudge codebase (and could be much bigger) where most of the code follows exactly the same few patterns (calls to `mkDerivation` or nixos module declarations), so I think the cost of maintaining a language optimized for those patterns is worth it (for scheme, lisp users tend to think that it is flexible enough to fit as a perfect DSL for any use case, so if this is indeed true, it also is an excellent choice − I always wanted to try some lisp but never found the strenght to fight those cohorts of parens so I couldn't make my own opinion on this). And the real cost of switching to a new language would probably be − much more than the sinking cost − the unavoidable split of the community (which already isn't that big...). (And for haskell in particular − at least GHC-haskell −, I really wouldn't like it for nixpkgs because I *really* wouln't want nix to depend on something as huge as GHC). That being said, I agree that nix is somehow weird (and I agree even more after having worked a bit on the grammar), and I would have by far preferred something closer to classical functional languages. -- Théophane Hufschmitt
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