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I think you are letting your specific feelings and head-canon about purity be mistaken for solid technical arguments.

If you’re sshing to boxes, editing things by hand and slinging ad-hoc commands around then your frame of reference is so far away from understanding it’s value proposition that it’s probably pointless to discuss it.



Nix solves the ad-hoc problem much more cleanly than Dockerfiles do


There’s purity of design/implementation and there’s usage. Often these are inversely related.

I like nix - it’s probably the right direction, but just compare the UX to Docker. Comparatively Docker absolutely nailed it.


In many ways I agree with you.

Just like Visual Basic 6, it's super-easy to get started with a Dockerfile, but nigh-on impossible to create a quality result with it.


There are similarities in the implementation as well, specifically around content addressable storage and layers.

Nix needs reproducible builds as well, which is a limiting factor. What’s nice about Docker is that it’s flexible enough to actually get stuff done.


> Nix needs reproducible builds as well, which is a limiting factor.

It doesn't have to be, Nix lets you choose your level of purity and it can build docker containers.


There are a variety of "overlays" springing up for Nix that might become what docker did for lxc containers:

- devenv

- devbox

- others i'm forgetting




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