Re:Nix – A One Pager
by Valodim on Sunday April 07, 2024 @04:10AM
(#39959146)
It's worth mentioning that Nix is pretty old at this point, it feels a little younger due to its recent surge in popularity. But 20 years ago (that is 8 years before v8!), the programming languages market looked quite different from today.
Guix shows that it's possible to use a different frontend language technically, but switching the nixpkgs repo itself over to anything else at this point would be an enormous community effort where it's hard to say whether it's worth it.
Re:Nix – A One Pager
by kreetx on Sunday April 07, 2024 @04:20AM
(#39959211)
Yeah. I guess the answer is that there weren't (m)any configuration languages which had functions - even YAML itself (which doesn't have functions) came out a few years before nix. Cue, starlark, dhall are all much later.
Guix shows that it's possible to use a different frontend language technically, but switching the nixpkgs repo itself over to anything else at this point would be an enormous community effort where it's hard to say whether it's worth it.