I want a programming language as soon as the program benefits from conditional clauses or subsystems. So if the will and know-how is there, would be great to have it from the start.

I was pretty happy the day I could move some Jenkins jobs to a Groovy script. I've worked with HCL significantly, but once I learned the idiosyncrasies of Pulumi, scripting infrastructure via a programming language was a better experience (good IDE autocomplete simplified things), though it requires more discipline.

Even without working with the Nix scripting language I'll dismiss it. When I looked at it was some kind of bastardisation of Bash with Haskell ideas. A hobby project idea at best, yet forced upon all Nix users. Guile Scheme is a nice small language, and Guix uses that, and I think that is a better approach.

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isityettime 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Nix isn't a scripting language in the sense you seem to have in mind. The snippets you saw that looked like Bash most likely were literally Bash, embedded as multiline strings in Nix.

Nix doesn't have much in common with Haskell.

Nix is a really small language, and you can learn pretty much all of it in a few minutes: https://nixcloud.io/tour/?id=introduction/nix

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lobofta 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Nix is awesome and has not been part of any pendulum (or clock). It's complex enough that it allows you to build programs with it, but on such a simple core that for all intents and purposes it is a config language.

	▲	zeratax 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		yeah i honestly like it a lot too, but i wish it was typed and that the tooling around it was better. though it's getting there...