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> What do you gain from learning Nix, asside from Nix?

Nix is a small and approachable lazy pure-functional language. You can learn a fair bit of functional programming by reading nixpkgs, which is frequently recommended even if you never use it in the real world.

> by learning Guile you learn a lisp which some people find quite enlightening.

By learning nix you learn a FP language which some people find quite enlightening.

Personally I can't find any software which I would want to contribute to or extend which uses guile (except GDB which can also be extended with python), so the "you ain't gonna need it" argument holds for guix too.

It's just such an odd argument for a relatively minor difference between the two ecosystems.



What you say would be the case if Nix uses Haskell or Guix uses some obscure purpouse made lisp


again, you said

> by learning Guile you learn a lisp which some people find quite enlightening

so learning a lisp is enlightening, but learning a FP language is not


FP is a paradigm. lisp is a language. you can use lisp to learn FP

if i wanted to learn pure FP i would probably pick many things over Nix


> if i wanted to learn pure FP i would probably pick many things over Nix

of course, but that wasn't the question:

> What do you gain from learning Nix, asside from Nix?


but if you wanted to learn lisp/scheme Guile is a very good choice whereas if you wanted to learn FP Nix is a pretty crappy choice




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