I like what I understand to be the core ideas of NixOS to be, but i have to say: There might be a chance that some century, people both in the industry and outside understand that new syntax, or languages, are rarely necessary, or even beneficial.

Use different semantics if you must, but please use some existing syntax for your DSL.

I'm so tired of learning a pointless new variety of almost the same thing, only with slightly different syntax, maybe some awkward string quoting, and some rather pointless syntactic sugar.

I'm not saying NixOS is the worst offender, but innovating in (mostly) superficial syntax, or using obscure syntax is almost certainly not well spent time except for a few very narrow niches/contexts. Especially not for prospective users.

I get it, it's fun inventing both languages and tools, I love doing it myself!

However, and in general: Don't invent a language when you need a tool, and vice versa.

The alternative is co-opting an existing language, which is what Ansible and Saltstack do with YAML. I find that to be much worse, since a lot more is valid as just YAML than ansible/salt files.

Agreed, Nix the language is probably unnecessary. (The main benefit I can think of is avoiding depending on the moving target that is basically any other scripting language they could have tried to co-opt.)

To be fair, Nix language is completely different from other languages out there -- it employs only immutable data structures -- so using another language would not be possible.

It does not excuse Nix to have such a braindamaged^W esoteric syntax.

> To be fair, Nix language is completely different from other languages out there -- it employs only immutable data structures -- so using another language would not be possible.

I don't think the immutability is actually important. Only derivations (which are basically language agnostic) need to be immutable/hashable.

> It does not excuse Nix to have such a braindamaged^W esoteric syntax.

What's so bad about it? The main pain point I've found with it is the lack of documentation for builtin functions. The syntax seems fine to me.

A programming language that "employs only immutable data structures" is effectively a macro processor language, no? Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language) .

Jsonnet is the closest I could find.

I feel like I should plug Guix at this point. Pretty much similar to Nix, but the config language is Guile, which is Scheme.