> I honestly wonder why there are such divergent opinions between say git and Nix?
Nix is:
1. difficult & different, where similar-ish tools are straightforward & familiar, (e.g. cloud-init, ansible, vs NixOS; or devcontainers using Dockerfiles, vs nix shells).
2. demands a significant amount of understanding, even for tasks which you'd expect to be easy.
e.g.: git is difficult, but you can get by with rote memorizing 5 commands (& copy-pasting the repo if you mess up). Emacs is difficult, but you're not required to use it. Haskell can be difficult to work with, etc.
I'd say that running `direnv allow` & using nix that someone else has written is unlikely to be difficult. But, having to write your own Nix code can be quite high friction.
> It also seems that Nix's model is less clean
I think nixpkgs is cluttered with organic mess of inconsistent designs.. but I think there's also friction where Nix's ideal package is built with `./configure && make && make install`, and many packages aren't quite that clean.
Nix is:
1. difficult & different, where similar-ish tools are straightforward & familiar, (e.g. cloud-init, ansible, vs NixOS; or devcontainers using Dockerfiles, vs nix shells).
2. demands a significant amount of understanding, even for tasks which you'd expect to be easy.
e.g.: git is difficult, but you can get by with rote memorizing 5 commands (& copy-pasting the repo if you mess up). Emacs is difficult, but you're not required to use it. Haskell can be difficult to work with, etc.
I'd say that running `direnv allow` & using nix that someone else has written is unlikely to be difficult. But, having to write your own Nix code can be quite high friction.
> It also seems that Nix's model is less clean
I think nixpkgs is cluttered with organic mess of inconsistent designs.. but I think there's also friction where Nix's ideal package is built with `./configure && make && make install`, and many packages aren't quite that clean.