Here's my problem.
I breezed through your explanation with great interest and became more curious than ever to try Nix out at some point - I've heard tidbits about it over the past few months and found it to be a fascinating project.
Then I read some of the other comments in this subthread, about Nix being Haskell and Guix being Scheme, and how the internals don't conform to the principle of least surprise within their development domains - and became sad.
On the one hand, there are going to be teething problems, that's fine.
On the other hand, if I'm learning a new package manager, I ONLY want to learn package management. My brain gets really confused if I don't stay highly domain-specific when learning new things. So if you present me with "you need to learn B to grasp and work with A" you'll just get a duck trying repeatedly to jump up over the curb and failing. Looks hilarious, maybe, but very impractical.
I don't know Haskell or Scheme yet, which puts a great dampener on me using Nix for a bit.
As another practical example, emacs and vi do greatly interest me (particularly emacs' flexibility), but I'm not interested in having to learn Lisp or memorize a Nethack labyrinth of single-character keyboard commands (and the scopes for what works with what and where).
I suspect I might pick up emacs at some point after I've played with Lisp/Scheme/et al for a while, but that's not right now.
TL;DR: It's a strain for me to learn new things (basically do anything that requires focus and can't be done with passive autonomy) if my mental stack already has anything in it. AKA, I have a monumentally stupid variant of ADHD that gives me learning difficulties.
I breezed through your explanation with great interest and became more curious than ever to try Nix out at some point - I've heard tidbits about it over the past few months and found it to be a fascinating project.
Then I read some of the other comments in this subthread, about Nix being Haskell and Guix being Scheme, and how the internals don't conform to the principle of least surprise within their development domains - and became sad.
On the one hand, there are going to be teething problems, that's fine.
On the other hand, if I'm learning a new package manager, I ONLY want to learn package management. My brain gets really confused if I don't stay highly domain-specific when learning new things. So if you present me with "you need to learn B to grasp and work with A" you'll just get a duck trying repeatedly to jump up over the curb and failing. Looks hilarious, maybe, but very impractical.
I don't know Haskell or Scheme yet, which puts a great dampener on me using Nix for a bit.
As another practical example, emacs and vi do greatly interest me (particularly emacs' flexibility), but I'm not interested in having to learn Lisp or memorize a Nethack labyrinth of single-character keyboard commands (and the scopes for what works with what and where).
I suspect I might pick up emacs at some point after I've played with Lisp/Scheme/et al for a while, but that's not right now.
TL;DR: It's a strain for me to learn new things (basically do anything that requires focus and can't be done with passive autonomy) if my mental stack already has anything in it. AKA, I have a monumentally stupid variant of ADHD that gives me learning difficulties.