The conceptual clarity combined with sparse documentation, rough edged user land, and the army of edge cases give me flashes of Docker in 2013/14.
It’s a pain to use but the promise is there. When setup and working, Nix seems like _the_ way forward for reproducible builds and dev environments at any 20+ dev team.
I work in dev experience at a larger tech company. I work on many different REPLs, often jumping into unfamiliar projects- in my first three months I’ve worked on go, python, node, terraform, k8s, etc.
With nix I’m able to clone a repo in an ecosystem I don’t use, create a couple files (flake.nix + .envrc) and reliably create a working, isolated dev environment that works and doesn’t mess my other projects… gaming changing.
(Plus I took the plunge after system issues to move to a VM running NixOS, defined in my dotfile repo.)
The language is difficult, the documentation needs to get there, the amount of breaking or confusing api are big hurdles. I think some simple wrapper like https://devenv.sh may be what gets the industry on board.