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It's difficult to not be Turing complete.

Makefiles are Turing complete: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/04/30/

Dhall and Dhall-nix are definitely a step towards that.

The ability to build abstractions is actually one of the key points of what makes Nix work, conceptually. So yes, a 'programming language' (how are you defining that anyway?) is absolutely a feature here.

Really what no one wants is a build step that takes forever. I'm more upset about how long nix-env -i takes than what the computational complexity of the programming language is

nix-env -i is slow because it has to evaluate every package definition. nix-env -iA is way faster.