Ansible is a different tool than Nix. It's been specifically designed to fit your exact use case. If ansible works for you and your team, there's no reason to drop it.
I've never had a moment using nix where I've felt "wow I couldn't do this with any other tool". That's not really the benefit of nix. The benefit is the flexibility of the idea and the tooling.
It's a flexible enough platform where I can use one config to manage 5+ computers in my house with various operating systems. I can use it to easily setup all my dependencies for my work projects. I can use it to build my work projects. I can use it to create vms to test those projects on. I can use it to build 3rd party projects without any instruction.
All that required was a few months of pain learning the fundamentals of nix and I've received the rest for free pretty much. It's the epitome of upfront work for long lasting benefit in my opinion.
For hobby, I use functional languages, and I find the techniques are the important bits to remember. Most modern languages let you easily stand on functional programming theory. You don't need to know Haskell. Everyone's brain works differently, but the idea of small, simple and occasionally flexible parts building a whole works for me. As opposed to the large complex do it all shape shifting machine.
I've bookmarked your project years ago to attempt implementing webrtc fully in a niche programming language. But I think I may have vastly underrated how difficult this is.
To fly a plane with 300+ passengers you still only need 2-3 pilots. That has remained consistent with the invention of autopilot. While we might still need a few human engineer experts, maybe we only need a few for small to medium sized companies? That may not eliminate the career for the top % but it effectively does for the vast majority of engineers.
What if there is simply nothing that can be done? I don't mean to sound defeatist, but what if there are some things that truly are like pandora's box. We can't put the lid back on. All we can do is educated people on how to use the tools correctly
What about Elm? I think most people could grasp the elm architecture in an afternoon. To me this MVU style is pretty much perfect for UI.
I think a lot of the time React appears complex and hacky is because we tried to solve world hunger with one component. I've worked on plenty of React projects that were very easy to scale, modify and iterate because they focused so heavily on small independent stateless components.
The ease in which you can get away with these tactics ad infinitum is starting to make me a pessimist. It feels like it takes almost an entire population of unified people, that are diligently advocating on behalf of themselves, to compete with a ruling class that has the resources to stay on the offense forever.
The ruling class doesn't even have to actively communicate and conspire with one another (although they do). Their independent attempts to undermine and control government furthers the agenda of all private businesses.
That's extremely difficult. I just don't assume something is impossible because it hasn't been done yet. Especially when there is an active battle to undermine and destroy such ideas by almost every powerful entity on earth.
I feel like you're fighting the fallacy of "the rich" being collectively blamed for every problem, by giving them credit for everything instead.
We know that none of the goods you listed would be available to the masses unless there was profit to be gained from them. That's the point.
I have a hard time believing a large group being motivated and mutually benefiting towards progression of x thing would result in worse outcomes than a few doing so. We just have never had an economic system that could offer that, so you assume the greedy motivations of a few is the only path towards progress.
It's quite odd to me that Nix or something similar like Mise isn't completely ubiquitous in software. I feel like I went from having issues with build dependencies to having that aspect of software development completely solved as soon as I adopted Nix.
I absolutely can't imagine not using some kind of tool like this. Feels as vital as VCS to me now.
Appreciate it, that makes a lot of sense. I feel like I've been trained to favor immutability so much in every language that I sometimes forget about these things.
Yep Rust approach won. Pretty much every new language is adopting Result style errors and it's been adapted to plenty of existing languages.
It's a product of functional programming, and for me I can't see how you would ever want to handle errors outside of the functional programming railway-oriented style. For me it's just superior.
I'm not sure that nobody thinks of this. We just have a finite amount of time. Usually with a solid approach, you get solid performance. Fixing a performance related bug rarely when it comes up, is still a time savings over designing this kind of rigorous process from scratch, and getting everyone on board with it.
Getting rid of a whole host of bugs due to the compiler is a big deal because you won't have to design this extra acceptance system or deal with keeping an entire organization disciplined by it. If you can solve this seamlessly I think that's an interesting product that others would be very interested in.
I'm sure most would stay at valve if they could. The just do so much contract work, and I'm sure a stable job at intel is better pay, benefits and stability.
I've never had a moment using nix where I've felt "wow I couldn't do this with any other tool". That's not really the benefit of nix. The benefit is the flexibility of the idea and the tooling.
It's a flexible enough platform where I can use one config to manage 5+ computers in my house with various operating systems. I can use it to easily setup all my dependencies for my work projects. I can use it to build my work projects. I can use it to create vms to test those projects on. I can use it to build 3rd party projects without any instruction.
All that required was a few months of pain learning the fundamentals of nix and I've received the rest for free pretty much. It's the epitome of upfront work for long lasting benefit in my opinion.