As a NixOS user, should I learn Perl? What use are there of Perl in the NixOS?

As perl is a language that comes baked in the system, should I learn Perl as someone who uses NixOS as a daily driver? What are the use cases of this languages in NixOS or linux in general, if at all? Do you recommend to learn any other language if not this?

Thanks for the replies. I greatly appreciate each of your responses. Have a good day/night.

What do you mean by ā€˜baked in the system’? Do you mean that your system retains references to it in the /nix/store? Eitherway, IIRC there is an effort to eliminate the usage of Perl in the build closure of the NixOS systems, and in scripts of all kinds produced by, and maintained in Nixpkgs.

You do not need to learn perl unless you’re making a PR for a perl script, same as most other languages. You should learn nix and bash, anything else isn’t strictly necessary.

3 Likes

In fact there’s a NixOS module you can use to make sure all the perl stuff is disabled.

I’m currently learning Nix. I have to say, it is ridiculously simple…so far. I’ve read the Nix.dev getting started part and am in the middle of doing ā€œa tour of nixā€ exercises. But for some reason, it feels like i’m missing something, idk what. What would be your recommendations or advice?
Oh btw, I have prior experience programming in C, CPP, Java.

Make nixpkgs PRs and read the nixpkgs manual, you’ll learn quickly due to all the feedback.

1 Like