And I think they rewrote a bunch of C libraries in order to have a better cross-platform compiler for C and zig. Or something along those lines

You can’t replace it.

Zig?

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

GPL is hard or tough to monetize

What do you mean?

stuff will get even spicier when we have conservations whether code is asset itself (especially scripts).

That’s true. What about LGPL?

e.g. don’t touch AGPL code unless you also use AGPL

Just to clear this up: copyleft licenses, GPL variants for example, require the license of your code to equally preserve the freedoms provided to your users, or in other words also be a copyleft license. There are some loopholes like GPL on a server, but be very careful when using copyleft code unless you want to use a copyleft license as well.

It gets somewhat murkier when you use someone’s code and base yours on that. IANAL, and that’s very much the legal territory. If at all possible, just reuse the original copyright and license and then derive your work (given the license allows that).

That all depends on the license AFAIK, but IANAL. Most FOSS licenses allow you to do whatever you want while preserving copyright claims, and that includes rewriting or changing the license. GPL forces copyleft, so even if you rewrote it from scratch, you could still be liable if you saw the original code.

For example I’ve heard that corpos bootleg copyleft code by having completely separate teams doing design and implementation. The implementation team can’t ever see any part of the original code, and they have limited communication with the design team. I think that would also go around the copyright claims as well.

If at all possible, just reuse the original copyright and license and then derive your work (given the license allows that).

Or just slap a GPL and subsume everything within a vortex of FREEDOM, and thusly become a true FOSS dude

there are very few “starter” Clojure jobs; they mostly expect you to have years of experience.

That’s because the language is made for people who wrote java for the last 10 years. It’s cool and all, but it’s horrible for learning programming when you compare it to cl or scheme. Neither of them break language uniformity and simplicity in order to accommodate java interop, while also having decades worth of excellent teaching material.

It’s a Lisp language which is the oldest kind.

Fortran, COBOL, ALGOL are older

Instead of “object oriented”, I think if it as verb oriented. Each statement is a verb (function) possibly followed by all the nouns you want to apply it to. Easy peasy, right?

I think you’re over complicating the explanation, it’s just a different notation:

(1 + 2 + 3) == (+ 1 2 3)

(1 + (2 * 3)) == (+ 1 (* 2 3))

People complain that there’s “too many parentheses”. People like to complain about dumb stuff.

I think it’s got more to do with everything seemingly being completely different. Most languages have C-style syntax, and python is like the only popular exception. It’s like knowing only latin and having to learn cyrilic or alphabet.

Julia, Clojure and Go. Are any of these good for a beginner or should I start with something else?

That totally depends on what you want to do.

Go should be easiest since it’s purposefully simplified in order to make learning it easier. There are some more difficult concepts, but the start should be easy enough. I know about go with tests, but it’s not really programming beginner friendly.

I’d avoid clojure as a beginner. It’s more for people who know java, but don’t want to write java. Common lisp and schemes are good for learning programming, but they’re not a popular group of languages and that can be a problem.

declarative > imperative all day, every day

I’m going to have to come back to Nix/NixOS in a bit.

Use nix + home-manager first for sure. It’s far easier, and you can slowly get into it while making a list of bleeding edge packages.

I’ll probably wait until the official docs catch up as it appears that they are quite a bit behind

Skip them altogether when you’re starting out. I gave up on trying nix the first few times due to how bad they are. zero-to-nix.com is better for learning the basics of nix.

That and I’m not sure how I feel about a DSL for package management. I’d much rather use JSON or YAML, or even INI or TOML.

The closest you can get is home-manager with a list of packages in a json-like format. It’s really not practical to develop a declarative system without a programming language. A basic example would be variables, more advanced would be to write a wrapper that modifies the package so it automatically runs the required cli commands to use your dediated gpu and nixGL with specific packages (nvidia-run-mx nixVulkanNvidia-525.147.05 obs for example).

It’s sort of like IaC where you’ve got terraform (dsl), pulumi (various languages), and cloudformation (json/yaml). Can you guess which one is universally despised?

Maybe if I were a LISP or Haskell guy.

Then you’d use guix and a dsl made within an actual programming language (much better approach IMO).

That’s such a bad name, I only see lixmaballs.

How do you like it, that’s one of the earlier forks, right?

In case you missed topic of the whole discussion:

Nix has the same mix of conceptual simplicity and atrocious user interface as git,

Nobody at any point compared the difficulty of learning the entirety of each of those systems, and my entire point is that the complexity of nix is not in the cli commands…

I don’t really care about the declarative/imperative thing, to me how many commands you “really need” is beside the point.

Caring is not required, but you need to at least understand the difference.

This is essentially the same argument as the people who say “git is not complex because you only really need checkout/commit/push, just ignore all the other commands.”

It’s really not.

Stage,commit,push,fetch,merge,etc. are all commands you need issue to git in order to manually create a desired state. You need to know what you’re doing, and what to do differently if there’s an issue.

home-manager switch does all of it on its own. You don’t use a different cli command if something’s broken, you change the source of truth. All of the commands you might use in an imperative package manager like apt update/upgrade/install/remove are instead that one command.

Even home-manager has this warning at the very top of the page that basically tells you “you need to understand all the other commands first before you use this,” and “if your directory gets messed up you have to fix it yourself.”

It’s quite a disingenuous interpretation of “beware: home-manager uses the nix language and so gives nix language errors” and “choosing to create configuration files might overwrite the existing ones for that package”…

If you’re using a programming language, expect error messages specific to that language/compiler/interpreter/whatever. And it’s not like every other PM is using standardised error messages, you still need to learn to read them.

Config files aren’t generated randomly, you need to manually enable the configuration of each package. If someone is capable of getting to the info required to know how to configure a package, it’s reasonable to expect that they can guess that changing a config might overwrite the existing one.

These are exactly the same kinds of problems people have with git.

Do tell me how you can solve git problems without changing the git commands.

You’re essentially saying that the terraform cli has the exact same problems as the aws cli, and that’s just ridiculous. They both let you host your blog, but they do it in a completely different way and therefore have different issues.

It’s far better in theory, but in practice it’s got some massive issues:

• non-free packages are taboo in the official guix community
• binary support was lacking the last time I used it (firefox didn’t have a precompiled bin for example, and that means you need to leave your browser to compile overnight)
• far less packages than nixpkgs even when you account for the non-free repo
• packages are seriously out of date (I tried using it as an additional pm a few months ago, and debian 12 was newer in a lot of cases)
• essentially no support for some programming languages and package managers (node and npm for example)

In it’s current state it’s really only good for emacs, lisps, and some other languages like haskell.

And how is SEL less for a rich person than RHEL?

You’re ignoring the difference between using something declaratory and imperatively. Just because it’s difficult to get to that one liner, it doesn’t change the fact you’ll still only use that one command. Git by it’s nature requires you to use different commands to achieve different results. Home-manager allows you to both update your packages and delete all of them with the same command, because that command is “sync the state with the source of truth”.

It’s working perfectly fine for me on desktop, jerboa, and voyager. Also, add a spoiler.

It’s much simpler because you’re using text files to define the expected state, the cli is there only to tell nix to figure out what it needs to do and to get on with it. Meanwhile with git you’re manually doing each of the steps until you reach the desired state.

I only need cd ~/dotfiles/nix/ && nix-channel --update && nix flake update && home-manager switch for everyday package management. It’s the nix version of apt update upgrade and install.

nix shell and nix run are pretty useful as well, and you’d want home-manager generations to rollback.

The confusion arises because there are 5 different ways to do the same thing, the non-experimental methods shouldn’t be used even though they’re recommended in the official docs, and you need to get lucky to get the info that you can use home-manager and that one liner.

It’s pretty easy for home-manager use, but still really useful. You can:

• choose which packages to install from stable and which from unstable
• add packages from repos that have flake.nix in them
• correctly match nix and home-manager versions, and always update them at the same time
• allow-unfree without nixpkgs conf, so 1 less directory required in .config (if they accepted the “experimental” features it’d be down to 1)

Here’s an example:

{
  description = "home flake";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
    home-manager.url = "github:nix-community/home-manager/master";
    home-manager.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
    nixpkgs-stable.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-23.11";

    # nixgl.url = "github:guibou/nixGL";
  };

  outputs =
    {
      self,
      nixpkgs,
      nixpkgs-stable,
      home-manager,
      # nixgl,
      ...
    }@inputs:
    let
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      pkgs = import nixpkgs {
        system = system;
        config = {
          allowUnfree = true;
        };
      };
      pkgsStable = import nixpkgs-stable {
        system = system;
        config = {
          allowUnfree = true;
        };
      };
    in
    {
      homeConfigurations = {
        shareni = home-manager.lib.homeManagerConfiguration {
          inherit pkgs;
          modules = [ ./home.nix ];
          extraSpecialArgs = {
            inherit inputs;
            inherit system;

            kmonad = pkgsStable.kmonad;
          };
        };
      };
    };
}

RHEL - 16 free licences and you can use them for whatever you want

Ubuntu pro - 5 free licences for personal use

SEL - you can try it out for 60 days or cobble something together while testing our enterprise packages

deleting files wouldn’t violate GPL-3.0

Unless you delete the license itself