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A comment on Nix 1.0 released: purely functional linux package manager. Parent comment

Re:Nix 1.0 released: purely functional linux package manager by jerf on Sunday May 13, 2012 @02:17PM (#3967764)
Purely functional does not mean "has no state at all". This meme needs a stake stuck through it, though beats me how to do it. Functional languages exist and do real work.

In this case it means that packages are handled as functional programming languages handle data values. New ones are created from old ones, and unreferenced values are cleaned up via garbage collection.

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Re:Nix 1.0 released: purely functional linux package manager by thurn on Sunday May 13, 2012 @02:52PM (#3967877)
It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that "purely functional" means "consisting of pure functions". Why not just say "functional" if that's what is meant?
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Re:Nix 1.0 released: purely functional linux package manager by 9mit3t2m9h9a on Monday May 14, 2012 @01:41AM (#3969648)
The aim of Nix is to make function from dependencies to resulting packages a pure function. Nix seems to have achieved it with respect to set of packages installed on a system; the most problematic thing now is that some packages manage to detect CPU version at build time... Fortunately, most of them allow to disable this feature.
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