dhall VS bramble

```

If you mean installing Dhall's dependencies (https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/blob/master/dhal...), those aren't too crazy, but they're definitely not all "beginner level". Template Haskell in particular is quite heavyweight.

Ok, lets be specific. Lets write a comment to explain this function:

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/blob/master/dhal...

I haven't tried it but apparently you can compile to Nix from Dhall:

> You can use this compiler to program Nix using the Dhall language. This package targets people who wish Nix had a type system.

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/tree/master/dhal...

If the problem is the syntax and people wants some other format that compiles to nix, there's dhall

https://dhall-lang.org/

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/tree/master/dhal...

https://www.haskellforall.com/2017/01/typed-nix-programming-...

Dhall is a generic config language with some programming capabilities (but not turing complete) that can compile to json, yaml, and other formats, like in this instance nix.

For my GSoC project, I built from scratch the dhall-csv package on the Dhall Haskell implementation Github Repository. Said package provides two executables, dhall-to-csv (which converts Dhall files into CSV files) and csv-to-dhall (which converts CSV files into Dhall files). It also provides Haskell libraries with the functions that translate bidirectionally between Dhall and CSV.

> If you add constraints (like not being able to feed the program to itself as is done in the halting problem and not allowing unbounded loops) then it is possible to determine if a program will terminate or not.

Dhall is a good example - https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell .

See also https://dhall-lang.org/

That just seems like an even greater nightmare to me. Soon you would have to learn to read and understand a custom program in a Turing-complete language for each and every installation.

The proper solution is a DSL, just a better DSl. Or perhaps a DSL embedded in something like dhall <https://dhall-lang.org/>, but definitely not a general-purpose programming language.

Dhall

I've been looking into Nix a lot lately (but have yet to take the leap - I'll probably start with devshell)

But a couple of projects have come up lately that piqued my interest wrt syntax and alteratives (Since I am not sure about Scheme anymore than Nix (as a langauge) :-)

  * https://github.com/maxmcd/bramble

An alternative to Nix that uses Starlark (python syntax) instead of a purely functional programming language: https://github.com/maxmcd/bramble

I struggled to climb the steep learning curve of Nix/NixOS and wondered what it would be like with a more familiar (to me) syntax.

It's been very rewarding to write. I was able to implement some ideas from the initial Nix paper that aren't present in Nix. Nix is also quite dependent on the use of the /nix/store path, but I was able to allow a user to use almost any path for their build store without sacrificing on the potential for a shared build cache. I also want to have better native support for things like building docker images, among other features.

I'm currently implementing sandboxing and finalizing some of the build structure, but hoping it'll be usable sometime soon.