It looks like someone threw a pinch of erlang in a Chef recipe. Like bash, but every English word operator has been replaced by space ships, angry squids, ternary operators, && all the other things that make code hard to read.

But... I still love Nix, and you get used to it.

Bash is still worse. Probably. I know it is ubiquitous, but if I can avoid writing Bash scripts, I do.

I have no idea why you would think that. It's pretty standard usage of punctuation like (){}[] etc. If it's hard to read that's because the libraries and infrastructure for writing derivations is not simple or well-documented. But that's not a language issue.