In the end, excessively clever people make me nervous, because they leave complex problems in their wake, which I'm not clever enough by half to solve.
You can keep your wget, build script, db config, and nginx config all in the same file!
I think if you weighed the complexity of Nix, and NixOS in particular, against the tools it replaces (or anyway, could potentially replace) it's a no-brainer. I'm a convert.
Nix, unlike say docker, actually solves a problem correctly in a principled way: reliably and reproducibly going from source artefacts and their dependencies to installed binaries/libraries/etc and without conflicts or undesired interactions between other installed binaries/libraries/etc, even different versions of the same thing.
It represents a major innovation and step forward in the depressingly dysfunctional mainstream OS landscape, that still is stuck with all the abstractive power of 80's BASIC but with concurrency and several orders of magnitude more state to PEEK and POKE.
I know some people write Windows software from Nix, but this is a way for Linux developers to make desktop apps for Windows users, not a solution to any problem Windows developers have.
1. They want to create a Game or Windows end user UI App (e.g. Overwatch or Photoshop)
2. They write some internal corp tooling or B2B software for windows shops (e.g. gluing some SAP or Oracle garbage together)
3. They want to write a server application (which means deploying on linux, which is basically the only server OS left). But they do not want to run linux as their desktop OS for corp or private reasons.
The 1st category probably has limited use for either docker or nix (in the absence of first class windows support). Might still be useful for tooling though.
The second category probably has use for docker mostly as a shitty linker, maybe also for isolation/security (I don't know the windows docker ecosystem).
The 3rd category can and totally should be using nix and I'd guess is at least double digit market share (so not insignificant; e.g. before Google banned them, a large fraction of Googlers had windows notebooks).
I don't use Windows as pretty UNIX, rather for its own capabilities.
Also, even if you come up with a forward facing solution and demonstrate it only on a particular domain you still, IMO, deserve most of the credit for solving the problem even if it takes others to translate it straightforwardly to other domains.
I'm less sure about windows, can you explain a bit more how you use docker containers for providing "native" windows stuff (as opposed to as a more lightweight linux VM replacement when developing something that you really want to deploy on linux)?
Usually the traditional option would be to snapshot the VM right after the first successful install.
However stuff like Windows Nano now makes it interesting to start playing with containers on Windows.
That is definitely an exaggeration, considering the utility the industry leverages with plain Dockerfile's.
However, I am curious about the specifics that you are probably thinking of, if you'll elaborate.
So sound very alienated and have a realistically cynical that accurately reflects of most of the industry. But please don't assume everything has to be that way. Tools like Nix and community efforts like Nixpkgs really are the exception.
I absolutely love this quote and very much feel the same. Often times I feel like the industry at large has a bit of a tricky problem, and then in fixing that problem they forget about a whole set of issues the thing they are trying to fix dealt with, so often times they've just traded one set of problems for another, just now with more complexity. Monolith vs. microservices is probably the best example of this: monoliths have a bunch of problems that make developing with large teams hard, but microservices add a whole host (e.g. transactional consistency, performance) of issues that are much more difficult to solve for most dev teams.
Nix real power is being a language that allows to describe all of those things in a declarative way.
They certainly do! And quite often, the reason they leave those problems is either a) they're not clever enough either, b) there's enough actual work that solving them doesn't make them feel clever, and/or c) there are other things they could do that make them look more clever.
I have made some really good money ripping out somebody's too-clever-by-half solution and replacing it with something simple, well supported, and dreadfully unfashionable.