Interesting that people usually have extreme reactions to Nix. You either love it, or hate it; very few people in between.
My first reaction was āOk, this is weird, letās see where this goesā and about 3 months in, I am still pretty much in phase :D, but yeah, I think I am in the exception with my lukewarm take, I see all the advantages, and I love the way it works for me, but I get itās not for everyone at all.
Some time ago I stumbled upon GoboLinux and thought it was quite interesting, which led me to Sanderās comparison of GoboLinux and NixOS. After reading the NixOS academic paper, it seemed to me NixOS provided a clean alternative to Gentooās use flags. I dual-booted Gentoo and NixOS, never intending to leave the OS I had been using quite happily for 12 years. But within two weeks I was sold. I could barely comprehend Nix expressions, but I made the switch and never looked back.
Por que no los dos? I, for one, fell head over heels in love with the idea as soon as I saw it, and ever since have struggled mightily with (and sworn regularly at) the implementation; a lazy dynamically-typed language (in my book) perfectly combines the run-time reasonability of Haskell with all the development-time safety of LISP.
Maybe Iām a masochist, but I love the lazy functional minimal expression-oriented JSON-like packaging DSL that is nix.
If it had types, I would love it more.
Went in expecting the opposite, was pleasantly surprised. His joke about the documentation reminds me of one of my uhh favorite bits from the manual:
A list of dependencies whose host platform is the new derivationās build platform, and target platform is the new derivationās host platform. This means a -1 host offset and 0 target offset from the new derivationās platforms.
Itās like an automated code to prose program wrote it 
.
Awesome, letās skip legrangians and jump right to the standard model of particle physics
Thatās not how you spell that 