I guess I just don't really think that Nix and Docker are opposite directions. This very much seems like a 'narcissism of small differences' situation to me.
In particular, what I find so misleading about saying its "moving in the opposite direction" is that it makes it sound like the success of Docker and whatnot is coming at the expense of approaches like Nix which I just don't think is true.
Almost nobody thinks docker-style containerization is the perfect solution to reproducibility, rather its a usable stopgap solution to just get something working without requiring the user to change their OS. In fact, I think a lot of the interest in, and adoption of Docker is making more and more people aware of the downsides and hitches with containerization, and is driving at least a subset of users towards Nix-style approaches. I think in the long run, this will benefit Nix.
In particular, what I find so misleading about saying its "moving in the opposite direction" is that it makes it sound like the success of Docker and whatnot is coming at the expense of approaches like Nix which I just don't think is true.
Almost nobody thinks docker-style containerization is the perfect solution to reproducibility, rather its a usable stopgap solution to just get something working without requiring the user to change their OS. In fact, I think a lot of the interest in, and adoption of Docker is making more and more people aware of the downsides and hitches with containerization, and is driving at least a subset of users towards Nix-style approaches. I think in the long run, this will benefit Nix.