nickel VS nix-doc

So, its key features are:

1. domain-specific: designed for conveniently creating and composing derivations. This reason alone already justifies a new language, or an embedded domain-specific language (such as the Guile/Scheme for guix), or a mix of both (Starlark, the build language of Bazel embedded in a restricted Python-variant).

2. purely functional: this ties well into the philosophical backing of Nix the package manager, which aims to be purely functional, also known as hermeticity in other build systems (Bazel).

3. lazily evaluated: similar to other build systems (including Bazel), so that you can build only what you need on demand.

4. dynamically typed: this one is controversial. Being dynamically typed—in other words, not developing a type system—gets Nix out of the door first. But users often complain about the lack of proper types and modularity. There are experiments to address this, such as Nickel (https://github.com/tweag/nickel).

It is understandable that a one-pager may not have space for the whys.

Nickel：Nickel is a straightforward configuration language aimed at automatically generating static configuration files. Essentially, it's akin to JSON with the addition of functions and types.

Also look at nickel which is an evolution of nix. It's my favorite in this space.

nickel-lang.org

https://github.com/tweag/nickel

Or this https://github.com/tweag/nickel

Nickel is a programming language. While HCL is just a configuration format, so not really comparable.

Here's a comparison with similar tools: https://github.com/tweag/nickel#comparison

As for 'providence', I suppose you meant provenance :) it's been delayed because this was less critical for 1.0 to decide on or to implement (as it: it doesn't break backward compatibility in any way to add this feature in the short term), but this is very much on the roadmap: Issue #235. That's a must-have in a language with merging like Nickel.

Have you considered using a different language for templating? this could be a BIG selling point. Some good ones are cue-lang (though I haven't seen support for rust), kcl or nickel-lang.

I love nix, I've been using it for the last 2 years, I have a very stable setup from these 2 years of effort [0], and I just can't recommend Nix for Linux beginners, why?

It's not because of the nix language, It's not because of the CLI, it's because everything is scattered, you have to consult many places to find out how to do things with Nix, here is an example:

Usually, when I need a new complex program, like Steam, I first check the system-wide configuration [1], the wiki [2] and the package list [3], if I just want it on my user, I need to check if Home Manager has an option [4], if it doesn't, I can try using the "home.packages" option. Now, if I need to override something on the package, I need to remember how to do it with [5] [6] (while checking the source code for the package in parallel to find the options).

And then sometimes, on very rare occasions, I need to fine tune something with the nix language, so I need to check the builtins/lib docs [7], but some builtins are not there, so I need to either use nix-doc [8] or find the docs inside the code-bases [9] [10] (they are split between both repos)

For me, this is one of the main pain points of using Nix / NixOS that needs to be solved.

[0] - https://github.com/shiryel/nixos-dotfiles

[1] - https://search.nixos.org/options

[2] - https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Steam

[3] - https://search.nixos.org/packages

[4] - https://mipmip.github.io/home-manager-option-search/

[5] - https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-customising-packa...

[6] - https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/nixpkgs-overriding-packag...

[7] - https://teu5us.github.io/nix-lib.html

[8] - https://github.com/lf-/nix-doc

[9] - https://github.com/NixOS/nix

[10] - https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs