I don't know Gluon (from a quick glance, it looks similar to Haskell and ML). But I do not think it will help much. Nix is a small, lazy, functional language. Being a lazy functional language, it will be more difficult for people without a FP background. But laziness and purity provides a lot of benefits.

I think the problem is more about documentation and expectations:

- Nix only has a small number of builtins. A lot of useful functions are in nixpkgs. As a consequence, you often have to look in two places to find if there is an existing function that does what you want to do. Added to that, some functions are undocumented and can only be discovered through the REPL or by reading the relevant nixpkgs sources. Then some functions do have documentation, but the documentation is very terse, does not contain good examples, etc. I think things would be clearer if Nix had a documented standard library and nixpkgs would only be focused on providing package derivations and NixOS modules.

- Expectation-wise: I think a lot of people do not expect to have to learn a new language when starting to use a package manager and/or distribution. This leads to treating derivations akin to RPM spec files (which is what I did in the beginning), which becomes frustrating very quickly.

Disclaimer: I am by no means a Nix expert. These are my observations from learning Nix myself since last year.