Nix 2.0 Released
I love the core concepts behind Nix, and have great respect for their engineering abilities. However I am skeptical of their ability to achieve broad adoption beyond their current community of passionate experts.<p>There are two reasons for my skepticism:<p>1. User experience. Unless you&#x27;re one of the &quot;passionate experts&quot;, the Nix user experience is pretty terrible. The learning curve is punishing compared to competing systems.<p>2. Elitist culture. In my experience, the Nix community is too smart for its own good. Their technical foundation is so far ahead of mainstream systems, and their technical design so satisfying to passionate experts, that they&#x27;ve forgotten how to live a day in the shoes of a mere mortal. Try pointing out flaws in the user experience, or the need to offer more pragmatic ways to migrate existing systems, and you will be met mostly with derision and reminders of Nix&#x27;s superior engineering. But superior engineering is not everything. If you want to spread the amazing potential of Nix to everyone, then you need to compromise with a flawed, imperfect world. You need to meet users half-way, and guide them to the promised land, instead of waiting for them to show up on their own. Otherwise someone will come along that will do it for you.<p>All this is eerily similar to what happened to functional programming communities.