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Comment by deltasevennine | Hacker News Reader

The critical part of nix that the developer failed to notice is user friendliness.

Sure I love to program, but that doesn't mean I want to program every aspect of my OS just so I can start writing a web app.

If you increase user friendliness of the app with a GUI or easily understood commands not only will more regular people start using it, but MORE developers will start using it too. Many developers just want to work on their own project with an OS that just works.

Hence why more devs use mac and windows over linux.

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If I were to speculate I think the absolute brutality of initial learning curve filtered anyone who perceives the usability as a problem so it never got improved.

No, the sad reality is that doing UX change are really hard and need deep change to the nix codebase. The nix codebase is more than unwieldy plus most people interested in UX... do not get paid to work on nix. Quite simply.

a good deal of users who overcome the usability issues of nix remain ill-equipped to contribute to nix beyond basic packaging. just because i can navigate Linux userland doesn’t mean i have a clue how to navigate the kernel, is i hope a not-terrible metaphor.

Nixpkgs and NixOS also some prolific contributors who never had any prior functional programming experience, so clearly there's a way out. We just have to capture and reproduce that.

I still can't really program in a functional programming language.

Exactly. You've learned what you needed to in order to be productive and achieve your goals with Nix, and that hasn't required you to stop everything to take a crash course in functional programming.

Individual functional programming techniques may become interesting to you as you become curious about some implementation details— you might read a bit about 'fixed point recursion' after you chat with some people about how overlays work. But you don't have to think of yourself as a functional programmer to make great use of Nix or even to help solve technical problems in Nixpkgs.

I think some folks hear all the FP talk surrounding Nix and don't realize that there's a lot they can achieve and contribute without being FP wizards. And that sucks. I hope that the ecosystem feels increasingly welcoming to people like that as the documentation and UX continue to improve.

> If you increase user friendliness of the app with a GUI or easily understood commands not only will more regular people start using it, but MORE developers will start using it too.

Making a GUI for generating Nix config is a complex task (and maybe not a better approach than providing a highly discoverable, user-frindly IDE experience, like DrRacket or something), so nothing like that is complete yet. But there are efforts along those lines that are still actively being worked on.

NixOS has also recently seen the addition of a graphical installer, for reasons like you describe. It's nice to see that kind of progress.

Doesn't the fact that it's pure and functional make it easier to do a GUI for? I dunno, I'm one of the people that loves the idea of Nice but was put off by the complexity and beginner unfriendliness.

IDE support (code intelligence etc.) is always good though.

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