Oh cool thanks a lot! Some of that stuff should get condensed into the Nix manual.
What always irritated me was the lengthy narrative style of the manuals… If you want people to understand stuff and get started quickly, write down the facts, but not as a novel. It’s so much work to scrape the right information out of that, and ChatGPT doesn’t help if it’s not written down precisely enough anywhere (also it’s not very good at being on point with few words).
Thank you so much for this post! It indeed made me curious enough to read the full thesis, and I’m really enjoying it so far. Very accessible, as you said, and really helps with understanding the reasoning behind a lot of the basic design decisions and the inherent complexity of the problems that nix solves.