Well I mean look at the docs. To each their own but I find Guile much more palatable than Nix. Moreover, I would rather spend time learning Guile than an obscure language like Nix. But for you Nix is a perfect DSL so i think we would probably be bashing our heads against the wall debating which is better.
As regards macros, Guile allows you to write your own macros in a pretty straight forward way that is just not the case in Nix
I do note that those Guix people that are feeling competitive towards Nix for whatever reason tend to over-rely on two arguments that just do not work too well when examined closely.
The first is "Nix is obscure the way Guile is not". I would argue both are equally obscure and neither is obscure enough for its quality or UX to suffer for it. And does expertise in Guile (base Scheme is trivial) carry over anywhere interesting?
The second is "Macros!", where the implied idea is that unrestricted syntactic extensibility is Good. Well, I like Lisp (more partial to CL then Scheme, but who cares at this resolution), and I find unrestricted syntactic extensibility to be more of a hazard than a benefit; plus the expressivity of a non-strict FP language really gets you close enough for practical purposes.
Besider Guix, Guile is also the default extension language for the GNU project. Moreover by learning Guile you learn a lisp which some people find quite enlightening. What do you gain from learning Nix, asside from Nix?
Moreover, "macros are good" in the sense that they are powerful and grant the user freedom to construct software in ways that are just not possible with languages that try to herd their users into a specific mode of behavioir. It is the old freedom and responsibility problem. Again, I believe it is a matter of choice and personal preference
> Guile is also the default extension language for the GNU project.
AFAIK Guix is the only project that uses Guile and has any actual users (I'm not counting Shepherd because outside GuixSD it is nothing). Guile is like 30 years old, and has been envisioned as "the default extension language for the GNU project" all that time (I was an active contributor for a while, so I should know). Guile is not even used by Emacs; Guile extensibility support in GDB is not even commonly built by distros. Guile is a nice and very competent Scheme implementation and I'd love for it to be useful outside Guix, but that's just not the case, and repeating that slogan won't change it. Seriously, just stop.
> It is the old freedom and responsibility problem
No, it is not. Software development is a social and technical field, not a branch of philosophy.
Oh boy, you didn't even answer my question about Nix. I guess you can't in a way that doesn't concede to my point - guile is definitely not obscure in the sense that nix is.
For what its worth, here is at least one recent funded project that is using Guile:
You also seem to think that I am some kind of Guix/Guile evangelist. No (I actually also prefer CL). I just happen to think that Guix is a better solution than Nix and that it uses a much better language.
> No, it is not. Software development is a social and technical field, not a branch of philosophy.
And I guess you get to say what's good and bad in field? Lol
Your question was basically "is this DSL generally useful outside the domain it's been designed for?", so I thought it was rhetorical. That said, the domain of building, configuring and packaging software is not exactly tiny and is only getting bigger as time goes on (which is more bad than good in itself, but beside the point)!
How useful is the DSL implemented by Guix outside Guix itself? What's the comparative mental footprint of that vs. base Guile? Things get interesting when you think them through honestly and avoid stale slogans.
Anyway, most people that I've come across who've used both nix and guix say that the learning curve for the latter is much less. HOWEVER, they usually stayed with nix because it had easier access to non-gnu stuff
From what I've seen (which matches my expectations going in), Guix relies on macros heavily enough to be considered a DSL on top of Guile (as opposed to "library" or "framework"). I could be wrong, of course.
Having macros does not equal having a DSL. In fact for me a big benefit of Guix is precisely that it doesn't use a DSL, but uses a well established and maleable language like Guile (Scheme)
Any set of non-trivial non-standard macros is a DSL, by definition. You have to know what a macro does and what it is for in order to even understand which of its similar-looking keyword or positional arguments are evaluated and which are not, how they relate to each other, etc, etc. I really don't see what you are arguing about here, or to what end.
> Any set of non-trivial non-standard macros is a DSL, by definition.
thats not entirely correct but even with that definition you should think about the non-standard part. guix uses standard guile syntax and has the whole guile language available to it.
anyway i think you are trying way too hard to equate nix and guile in a way thats simply doesnt click with me. maybe you invested too much time learning nix to concede that there is something better and simpler out there
> guix uses standard guile syntax and has the whole guile language available to it.
I feel I'm not getting through here. Let me try again: Guile is base Scheme plus some SRFIs plus some more extensions. None of this is useful outside the Guix bubble, because it is not really used for anything outside that bubble. I suppose pointing at a hundred Texmacs users who picked it up after being exposed to Guix would prove me wrong, but good luck with that.
> maybe you invested too much time learning nix
Maybe armchair psychoanalysis is extremely bad form. Note that I'm not trying to argue against Guix (or Guile, or GNU, or whatever) -- for all I know Guix is just great, and I know Guile is great (shall I rephrase and repeat this disclaimer again until it "clicks"?). I just tend to be triggered by idiotic sloganeering argumentation, especially when it is repeatedly reflexively employed as if it can substitute for a honest technical comparison.
> Guile is base Scheme plus some SRFIs plus some more extensions. None of this is useful outside the Guix bubble, because it is not really used for anything outside that bubble.
"idiotic sloganeering argumentation"?
> honest technical comparison
let me spell it out for you in another way
nix is developed in cpp (which itself is a huge collection of dsls) and you use its own (poorly documented) dsl to interact with it
guix is developed in guile and you use guile to interact with it
this alone implies that you get far more from just learning guile than nix dsl if all you want to do is package management
>I suppose pointing at a hundred Texmacs users who picked it up after being exposed to Guix would prove me wrong, but good luck with that.
you keep sloganeering that guile is useless outside of guix. i find it pretty funny how willing you are to twist the picture of reality in order for it to fit your world view. i already pointed you to another significant project that uses guile. here is the part in their documentaion spelling out their choice for guile: https://spritely.institute/static/papers/spritely-core.html#...
as for texmacs, i dont know where you are pulling your numbers from, but i for one used texmacs for writing papers before even considering taking on software development professionally. so please don't be triggered if i dont take your claim at face value
And let me make some further general observations here, while I'm unfortunately procrastinating.
People use software to solve their problems. The way you "sell" (in whatever sense) software to people is by showing them which of their problems it solves (they don't even have to be explicitly aware they have those problems in the first place, BTW) and how.
Nix(OS) is adopted first and foremost because it clearly solves some pressing problems. It allows you to have many development environments that don't stomp on each other, without managing a zoo of containers or VMs. It allows you to specify the operating system (or even just the user environment) you use, over as many machines as you need, deterministically and while ensuring that once you solve a problem it stays solved.
Those are real pain points, and since Nix solves them it would be used by people regardless of those people feel about Nix-the-language, because language appreciation is not the main reason people use it -- pain is.
Some goes for Guix, obviously.
So if your goal (whatever your motivation may be) is to explain to a Nix user how Guix is better, you need to point out something that is relevant to the person you are "selling" to and is fundamentally painful with Nix and painless with Guix. And, well, reaching first thing for "Guile is the official extension language of the GNU Project" does not do your marketing effort any favors.
That looks like a typical academic project that is overwhelmingly likely to die as soon as the grants run out, what am I missing? Where are the users?
> nix is developed in cpp
Who cares?
> its own (poorly documented) dsl to interact with it
Nix documentation is not by any means ideal and is kind of scattered, but calling it "poor" is a blatant misrepresentation.
> guix is developed in guile and you use guile to interact with it
> this alone implies that you get far more from just learning guile than nix dsl > if all you want to do is package management
Argument by repetition, wonderful.
> as for a one to one technical comparison, it is just a google search away
That is... not good. And when a commenter pointed out its biases and misleading generalizations, the author invited them to go listen to a stream, lol, nope.
> you keep sloganeering that guile is useless outside of guix.
That's because it is, no need to get so defensive about it. It does not detract from its technical qualities! In any case, the goalpost got moved way far from the original "Guile iS tHe OfFiCiAl eXtEnSiOn LaNgUaGe Of ThE gNu PrOjEcT", wouldn't you say?
> forgive me if i dont take your claim at face value
"Guile is for all practical purposes useless outside the Guix ecosystem" is my null hypothesis here and so far I stand by it. "Proving" that would be proving a negative, so I don't intend to even attempt that. It should, however, be fairly easy to disprove if you have data. Show us how learning Guile (or any Lisp that is not Elisp really -- sad!) is likely to be worthwhile for a "normal person" apart from using it for Guix.
if you know nix DSL but dont know cpp (whatever it means to know cpp) then the whole nix internals are just a black box to you. this is simply not the case with guix. if you cant see the benefit of guix/guile relationship here then there is not much more i can say to you
anyway as i said at the start this whole thing is just heads banging against a wall. i have no problems with you holding your views. it just happens that i disagree with them. if you expect of me to promote the virtues of lisp to you then im sorry but thats not gonna happen. you can do your own discovery. if you dont know then you dont know :)
> the whole nix internals are just a black box to you.
Yes, and just as well. Modern software is a barely-holding-together tower of abstractions as it is. Do you find yourself looking at the C source of Guile's runtime often? Or Glibc? The Linux kernel? Intel microcode? Aren't you glad you don't have to?
(Nixpkgs, on the other hand, is very accessible and many parts of it make for great reading)
> if you expect of me to promote the virtues of lisp to you then im sorry but thats not gonna happen.
No, I hope (in vain, looks like) that you'll start making some sense and stop using and then desperately defending stupid arguments.
Looking at Nix internals would, over at the Guix land, be more like looking at the Guile compiler, or garbage collector -- all Nix-the-tool implements is the language and the primitive derivation machinery. Could certainly be educational, but neither is nor should be required of anyone _using_ the abstraction in question.
Do you have any more deliberate obtuseness to share, or shall we stop?
regardless of who is right, the fervent opinions and bless-your-hearts in this thread tell me that I'm better off using neither. Purity tests are fucking dumb, escalating goalposts are fucking dumb, worrying about how others compute is fucking dumb. We're all nerds here, there's no need for this level of emotional investment into other people's opinions..
You're absolutely right, but if that makes you not try something you might be missing out. For example, Rust is probably my favorite programming language (definitely my favorite native-code-producing one) even though I find some of the community extremely off-putting.
> 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.
> Moreover by learning Guile you learn a lisp which some people find quite enlightening. What do you gain from learning Nix, asside from Nix?
This thread is baffling. cmm is asking a fairly simple question. He's not trying to make a point. If people don't have the answer, they need not respond! There are so many responses to him - none answering his question.
If you're part of the 99% who know little of Lisp languages, he is correct. There's not much of a difference between 0.001% and 0.01%, when you're working in numbers like 20+%.
While Guix is the Guileverse's biggest and most successful project, a lot of the compiler/VM work that happens in Guile happens pretty independently because Andy Wingo just likes to hack on Guile. Guile would still be here, but the community would be smaller.
> i think any person with a cs education would at least recognise lisp syntax
The discussion wasn't on Lisp, but Guile. They may recognize Lisp syntax, but the majority will not have heard of Guile (let alone Scheme).
And you are referring to recognizing Lisp syntax, which is not what I was referring to when I said "know little of Lisp languages". Sure - most know it exists and has a lot of parentheses.
BTW, many if not most programmers don't have a CS education. And many who do don't encounter Lisp in their curriculum. I just checked my undergrad's required courses - the PL course has Java, SML, Prolog and Python - no Lisp. Anecdotally, in all the teams I've worked in for my career, there was only one team where people had an idea of Lisp. In the other teams, they didn't even know that it's the language with a lot of parentheses (as in they'd look at Lisp code and have no idea which language it was).
As regards macros, Guile allows you to write your own macros in a pretty straight forward way that is just not the case in Nix