I Was Wrong about Nix
As much as I admire the people involved with Nix, taking the initiative to solve what they believe can be improved and the other developers like her, toying with new things and successfully managing to figure all this stuff out... I&#x27;m actually disappointed.<p>The thing is, Nix is an absurdly complex piece of software, perhaps on a similar order of magnitude as maybe Kubernetes or other gizmos, requiring a very large time commitment to understand and to use properly.<p>Just for fun, have any of you tried to keep up during the Docker bigbang, with all these technologies popping up left and right, switching names, dying abruptly, getting super-seeded or hacked with vulnerabilities? That was one of my most mentally draining year for me and I&#x27;ve been in the field for a while now.<p>See... along the way, I&#x27;ve learned that Computer Science is always about tradeoffs. Now when I&#x27;m being asked to trade away my sanity learning this nonsense for in return a couple of megabyte of disk space that could&#x27;ve been wasted, I just don&#x27;t see the value.<p>Seriously, are we optimizing for the right stuff here? I know Nix is doing package isolation with a programmable environment defined by text files, it&#x27;s immutable and all. I get it. But we have alternatives for these problems. They do a pretty good job overall and we understand them.<p>Ironically, even those solutions I&#x27;m comfortable with are still struggling to get good adoption! How the heck is our field going to avoid fragmentation when it keep growing exponentially like this.<p>Perhaps it&#x27;s just me aging and getting groggy; though there must be an explanation for this phenomenon. Please, it definitely gnaws at me.