I love nix. I started on flakes and have no clue what configuration.nix, channels, or nix-env even are.

Its pretty much a toolchain to orchestrate a bunch of community bash scripts with some (optional) syntax sugar to do most things right in nix.

Scripts break. So did my own when I left the sandbox of any other distros curated version set. Now its version controlled and I can rollback.

Functional programming skills are helpful. The documentation is shit. Like really really bad. I had to go through a few lib/ src to figure out modules. It just wasn’t clicking until I did with the abstractions until I looked at the code.

I mostly search GitHub now a days for solutions with lang:nix and some tokens I know I’ll need and analyze what someone else did.

I look at the source for package defs often.

The repl can be handy.

It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing approach. I wanted to switch to Nix but got lost way in the weeds with declarative partitioning, immutable OS with impermanence and snapshots, fucking coding my own gnome shell with AGS/Astal for Hyprland, and making overrides for bleeding edge software updates from GitHub.

Realising it was going to be a hot minute before I had a daily driver OS, I started using Home Manager on my Ubuntu daily drivers and installing NixOS on some spare hardware to tinker with.

The majority of the apps I use are now managed through Nix the package manager on all my Linux systems.

I do use flakes and what’s installed on Ubuntu is managed with the same files as my NixOS builds. So far I’m really happy with it.

I use a single flake with outputs for all my nixos and home manager only (Ubuntu) systems. I just started messing with nix in December. I have no idea what the old way is, but I’ve been happy with flakes.

I’m coming from a Haskell/Scala background. This job just pays more. TS has been “good enough” for types. I don’t think I could be as effective without them at this point.

I don’t see it dying from my perspective. Its only been getting better and better. The only thing I could see displacing it in my org is maybe Rust due to WASM proving a transition path.

We use TS on the back end to leverage our teams existing skill set and libraries we’ve built up.

I know it’s a meme to use “the next best thing” in the ecosystem, but we’ve been really happy with the newish Effect library + Bun runtime. Effect is like a merger of the older fp-ts/io-ts libraries (same author works on both) with Zio from the Scala ecosystem. It vastly simplifies the former and the new stuff with dependency injection and defect management is refreshing. With the Bun runtime, we see a 15x faster startup time (great for dev). Its halved the RAM requirements in prod. We don’t even need to transpile… We still do for prod to tree-shake dev-only code to ensure its not available in prod, but deploying to dev is FAST.

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4

Have an upvote. Thanks for trying. Interesting to me also, but yeah, its dead in here.

There is support for this in Effect as another implementation.

https://effect.website/docs/guides/style/pattern-matching

If you are interested in pushing more, there are other JVM languages.

Scala was my first functional programming language after doing Java -> Groovy -> Scala. All 3 can access the entire Java ecosystem and are compatible with each other. Scala is like having Generics for your Generics (Higher Kinded Types).

Motivation is one hell of a teacher.

Love Star Trek and a lot of Sci-Fi for this reason. Just finished binge watching Strange New Worlds where standing up for what is right is a core tenant of the crew. In contrast, one of the recent Ashoka episodes really hit me with the quote “sometimes even the right reasons have the wrong consequences”. It really sums up my experience in the world we live in and where we could be.