> But when we actually attempt to do something in Nix, we run into countless bugs and problems, including inaccurate documentation.
This is really unfortunate. Unless you invest time into learning which paths to walk, you're not going to have a great experience with Nix. That just doesn't scale to modern engineering teams, you can't expect everyone to know everything.
> Plus, a coworker pointed out that while its supposed to be pure and functional, many recipes still basically wrap a shell script. So its not that far from the build system we already have...
It's true that a lot of nix expressions boil down to a shell script. But by default they're running in a sandboxed environment that can be exactly replicated and guarantees (mostly) reproducible results. And that's great - after some ceremony to set everything up, Nix lets you work with the tools you already know, but puts them into a reproducible environment.
This is really unfortunate. Unless you invest time into learning which paths to walk, you're not going to have a great experience with Nix. That just doesn't scale to modern engineering teams, you can't expect everyone to know everything.
> Plus, a coworker pointed out that while its supposed to be pure and functional, many recipes still basically wrap a shell script. So its not that far from the build system we already have...
It's true that a lot of nix expressions boil down to a shell script. But by default they're running in a sandboxed environment that can be exactly replicated and guarantees (mostly) reproducible results. And that's great - after some ceremony to set everything up, Nix lets you work with the tools you already know, but puts them into a reproducible environment.