> Let me guess: you come from a ML or Haskell background
As a professional computer scientist I am familiar with all the major programming paradigms and all the general syntactic modes, whether that be C-like, Python-like, Ml-like, prolog-like, lisp-like, etc.
Yes I have worked professionally as a ML and Haskell programmer but I currently work on Assembler and c++, so my background is equally in both pots.
Nix is entirely unsurprising to anyone who is familiar with lambda calculus which should be all computer programmers really. It's fundamental. It'd be like a linguist not knowing what a preposition is.
> As a professional computer scientist I am familiar with all the major programming paradigms and all the general syntactic modes, whether that be C-like, Python-like, Ml-like, prolog-like, lisp-like, etc.
This is an overly pretentious opening for a comment even for HN.
It certainly makes me feel the need to point out that the majority of people on HN (including myself) are most certainly not "professional computer scientists." Neither are users of Docker nor system administrators. Opening your comment this way is implicitly excluding those people from using Nix.
> Nix is entirely unsurprising to anyone who is familiar with lambda calculus which should be all computer programmers really. It's fundamental. It'd be like a linguist not knowing what a preposition is.
I took my computer science classes from a department that was probably slightly more math-focused than the median CS program. Among those classes was a (optional to non-honors students) 400 level theory of computation class. I don't believe there were more than 2 hours of lecture regarding the lambda calculus, just as an aside that it was an alternate model to Turing Machines and was fully equivalent. We had a single weekly assignment that involved it.
I encountered the lambda calculus more in my philosophy classes than in my Computer Science classes.
On top of all of that, I know I am not alone in finding many forms of mathematical notation, including the lambda calculus, to be poor notation for writing software.
As a professional computer scientist I am familiar with all the major programming paradigms and all the general syntactic modes, whether that be C-like, Python-like, Ml-like, prolog-like, lisp-like, etc.
Yes I have worked professionally as a ML and Haskell programmer but I currently work on Assembler and c++, so my background is equally in both pots.
Nix is entirely unsurprising to anyone who is familiar with lambda calculus which should be all computer programmers really. It's fundamental. It'd be like a linguist not knowing what a preposition is.