Comment by peterldowns

4 days ago

If it can write a nixos flake it's significantly smarter than the average programmer. Certainly smarter than me, one-shotting a flake is not something I'll ever be able to do — usually takes me about thirty shots and a few minutes to cool off from how mad I am at whoever designed this fucking idiotic language. That's awesome.

I was a major contributor of Flake. What in particular is so idiotic in your opinion?

  • I use flakes a lot and I think both flakes and the Nix language are beyond comprehension. Try searching duckduckgo or google for “what is nix flakes” or “nix flake schema” and take an honest read at the results. Insanely complicated and confusing answers, multiple different seemingly-canonical sources of information. Then go look at some flakes for common projects; the almost necessary usage of things like flake-compat and flake-util, the many-valid-approaches to devshell and package definitions, the concepts of “apps” in addition to packages. All very complicated and crazy!

    Thank you for your service, I use your work with great anger (check my github I really do!)

  • FWIW, they said the language was bad, not specifically flakes. IMHO, nix is super easy if you already know Haskell (possibly others in that family). If you don't, it's extremely unintuitive.

I mean, a smart programmer still has to learn what NixOs and Flakes are, and based on your description and some cursory searching, a smart programmer would just go do literally anything else. Perfect thing to delegate to a machine that doesn't have to worry about motivation.

Just jokes, idk anything about either.

\s