nix-1p VS nickel

Fair enough. I've also had a couple of programs which weren't packaged already, fortunately it's quite easy to do so most of the time (or to just fall back to a distrobox container or flatpak in the worst case). If you decide to try it out, nix-1p and Nix Pills were great resources for me to get familiar with Nix and NixOS in a short time-span.

Wouldn't say there's a steep learning curve for the language itself, it's pretty easy to get a grasp around it imo. Here's a helpful page I used to quickly get familiar with the language: https://github.com/tazjin/nix-1p

What's rather messy about Nix is nixpkgs with its helper functions all over the place alongside pretty shallow / non-existent documentation (which is unrelated to the language). Thankfully they've started to work on that recently: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/documentation-team-flattening-...

I wrote a language tutorial for only the language a while back, and have gotten the feedback that it has helped a lot of people - maybe it'd clear something up for you: https://github.com/tazjin/nix-1p

For Nix language things I really like this page: https://github.com/tazjin/nix-1p

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

https://github.com/tweag/nickel could try this

I'll also add another candidate if lua isn't the right path (I still think it is): Nickel.

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

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.

Nickel isn't the first such project. Similar languages already existed: Jsonnet, CUE, Dhall, and Nix to some extent (albeit specialized). Our starting point was in part adding typing to Nix, and we found that the aforementioned language didn't satisfy our design constraints (you can take a look at the RATIONALE.md document for more details).

One target-use case of Nickel is to be used as an alternative front-end for Nix (instead of Nix expressions). There is a draft RFC and a repository to use Nickel to write development shell (Nixel). The goal is that, one day, you can actually just transparently call to Nix code and into Nixpkgs. Until then, I totally understand that nothing can be the power of levering Nixpkgs... so your approach makes sense :)