I've been a happy
#Nix user since 2016 and I'm now planning a migration to
#Guix, so I'm conscientiously reading
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/ .
I realize that the following two points which seem minor on the outside have actually a rather sizeable impact:
- using an existing language (Guile) vs. creating a new one (Nix): getting to carve your language precisely to your needs is an ultimate opportunity (and incidentally, that's one of the central features or Scheme ant Lisp), but in practice writing a library in a existing language and adding a couple macros feels more comfortable for a casual user like me; I feel I haven't given Nix enough use because I keep forgetting its syntax, and so I still do a lot of tiny things in shell scripts;
- homoiconicity, the classical Lispy code-is-data-because-everything-is-a-list-anyway thing seems to allow doing some cool stuff (
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/G_002dExpressions.html#G_002dExpressions), and in a orderly fashion, because Lisps have had an eternity to get homoiconicity right.
Can't wait to get my new machine and give Guix a real ride.
And shoutout to
#Guix #developers for the excellent manual! (I am explicitly *not* comparing it to the Nix manual, which is very good as well.)