this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
23 points (96.0% liked)

Programming

26227 readers
203 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lmr0x61@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Guix is such a cool idea, but Nix accomplishes essentially the same thing, and the syntax is much more accessible in a post-JavaScript world. Most programmers nowadays aren’t that familiar with Lisp-like syntax, for better or worse.

I don't hate on any language's syntax tbh, but the tooling for nix is absolutely miserable compared to similar.

People hate on yaml a lot, but I can start typing and then press tab and it completes a whole template for whatever k8s objecy I am trying to make. Having to copy from my other project's shell.nix/whatever into the new one feels miserable in comparison.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 days ago

I do agree, yeah, although I can certainly also understand LISP fans being annoyed that someone created a custom DSL for something that is adequately solved by the LISPs. I'm also certainly not enamored with the Nix syntax myself, but do find it easier to parse than a million parentheses.

But yeah, ultimately the complexity of Nix and Guix isn't in the particular symbols you type out. The complexity comes from them being expression-based (which does make sense for the use-case, but isn't as familiar as e.g. imperative languages), as well as just having to learn tons of modules for the different things you want to configure...