> That is the "tragedy of good enough" and why Nix, NixOS, jails, FreeBSD or anything else won't be as popular until vaguely low skilled developers can get easily started with them. Maybe things just need to cool down and become more stable
Right. The Dockerfile format is much less elegant than Nix, but it's easier to get started with, and can be used for most cases.
I don't necessarily see everyone _writing_ Nix. But I think one way Nix can gain in adoption with developers is Nix makes it easy to make dependencies available for working on a project.
I'd also point to git: many developers struggle to use git; and might use it for some time without an intuitive understanding. The network effects of GitHub have somehow been enough to make git a prominent tool, despite it being difficult to use.
I think as more Nix stuff becomes copy-pasteable, there are enough use cases which don't require deep understanding of Nix.
Right. The Dockerfile format is much less elegant than Nix, but it's easier to get started with, and can be used for most cases.
I don't necessarily see everyone _writing_ Nix. But I think one way Nix can gain in adoption with developers is Nix makes it easy to make dependencies available for working on a project.
I'd also point to git: many developers struggle to use git; and might use it for some time without an intuitive understanding. The network effects of GitHub have somehow been enough to make git a prominent tool, despite it being difficult to use.
I think as more Nix stuff becomes copy-pasteable, there are enough use cases which don't require deep understanding of Nix.