One of the "why lix?" bullet points on their about page:
Built for a community, not for a corporation.
Lix is built by a team of open-source volunteers – and exists to provide an alternative to the commercial interests that have long plagued both upstream CppNix and corporate-authored forks. We’re proud to stand by our open conflict of interest statements, and proud to listen to community voices on issues of sponsorship, direction, and moderation.
There's no cppnix, its just nix. That's some bs naming added on by people (not the creator). The repo and tool are still solidly called nix.
Of course there's corporate sponsorships, how else do you expect people to work on this stuff full time and eat. Food and Shelter aren't handed out for free last I checked.
“Nix” is a very overloaded term. It can refer to Nix-the-language, Nix-the-interpreter, Nix-the-command-line-tool etc. CppNix is specifically the code body developed in https://github.com/nixos/nix. It (among other things) implements Nix-the-language. E.g. https://tvix.dev/ also implements Nix-the-language, despite sharing no code with CppNix.
It’s just a way to distinguish a language from its implementation, similar to Python / CPython, or Rust / rustc, or C / gcc. Yes, officially they’re both named Nix, but that’s not helpful when you’re trying to discuss alternative implementations: “Nix implements Nix” just sounds like a tautology.
I think it's like CPython. The original implementation of the Python programming language was just called Python. Once there were multiple implementations it became useful to call it CPython sometimes. It depends on the context. Nix is both a language and an implementation. Calling the original implementation of Nix CppNix is a way to distinguish it from other implementations (like Tvix or Lix).
Edit: This is not a comment on the rest of the content of your post. I just thought it was kind of fair to call it CppNix!
If I remember correctly originally perl was a large part of nix's implementation. I thought they avoided haskell or another functional programming language in fear of recruitment issues and went with perl in part because it was known by the implementors.
Here is a github issue where they talk about some of the transition to cpp:
Built for a community, not for a corporation. Lix is built by a team of open-source volunteers – and exists to provide an alternative to the commercial interests that have long plagued both upstream CppNix and corporate-authored forks. We’re proud to stand by our open conflict of interest statements, and proud to listen to community voices on issues of sponsorship, direction, and moderation.
https://lix.systems/about/