a good deal of users who overcome the usability issues of nix remain ill-equipped to contribute to nix beyond basic packaging. just because i can navigate Linux userland doesn’t mean i have a clue how to navigate the kernel, is i hope a not-terrible metaphor.
Nixpkgs and NixOS also some prolific contributors who never had any prior functional programming experience, so clearly there's a way out. We just have to capture and reproduce that.
Exactly. You've learned what you needed to in order to be productive and achieve your goals with Nix, and that hasn't required you to stop everything to take a crash course in functional programming.
Individual functional programming techniques may become interesting to you as you become curious about some implementation details— you might read a bit about 'fixed point recursion' after you chat with some people about how overlays work. But you don't have to think of yourself as a functional programmer to make great use of Nix or even to help solve technical problems in Nixpkgs.
I think some folks hear all the FP talk surrounding Nix and don't realize that there's a lot they can achieve and contribute without being FP wizards. And that sucks. I hope that the ecosystem feels increasingly welcoming to people like that as the documentation and UX continue to improve.
