@fricklerhandwerk: Starting from the bottom makes it easier to understand it in my experience
@roberth: Depends on the kind of docs, reference docs should be bottom-up, very detailed. For other documentation you can start at a higher-level, e.g. guides are specifically suited for that
@zmitchell: Before you can teach something you have to break down the misconceptions, e.g. giving an example where it doesn鈥檛 work, then show why it doesn鈥檛 work. What are misconceptions people have about Nix?
Although people might not have a lot of misconceptions about Nix, but rather about other package managers
@khaled: Misconceptions around what problems it solves
@fricklerhandwerk: Have observed a large number of distro-hopping users coming with assumptions about how GNU/Linux works. They are currently not our target audience though.
@roberth: Came from functional programming myself, so I didn鈥檛 struggle much with Nix
@infinisil: Also coming from Haskell, which is really well designed, but the Nix ecosystem was hacked on for like 20 years, leading to a lot of quirks
@zmitchell: Nix is a lot simpler from a language perspective, difficulty comes from it being blue for everything else
@khaled: Lazy evaluation is a little mind-bendy. Another part is Nixpkgs
@fricklerhandwerk: Remember spending a lot of time trying to understand parts of Nixpkgs
@zmitchell: Overlays are really mind-bendy to new users
@fricklerhandwerk: Cannot fix 20 years of hacking quickly (Nixpkgs Architecture Team exists to fix it slowly though), but we can write down a path to explain it
we may want to provide a content map to give users a way to navigate through the different concepts to understand.
@infinisil: Giving a brief introduction to the team and nix.dev for @roberth
@fricklerhandwerk: Meetings sometimes feel like unproductive chatter, but the point is communicating shared knowledge and dispell misconceptions
@roberth: Same experience when writing my own stuff, coming back to it after some years gives you an entirely different perspective. Discussing is good if we also get stuff done outside discussing
@infinisil: Feel like we鈥檙e discussing a bit too much, maybe we can scale meetings a bit better
