I’ve been working with Nix for years and I still find it to be disappointing. I don’t like Docker and I really love the Nix concept, but the execution seems poor. As an example, I spent half of a Saturday unsuccessfully working with people on the Nix Discord to get VS Code configured with some Rust plugins on MacOS. Similarly, if you need to write your own package, it might be easy or it might be a bottomless rabbit hole tar pit in which you have to package the entire dependency tree including a bunch of obscure C libraries with no build docs. More often than not it seems to be the latter. Further still, nixpkgs is horribly documented and dynamically typed and poorly organized, so every time you’re looking at a definition for a certain package and want to know what “shape” its dependencies have, you have to grep around for another package that uses it, then try to work out what that package is passing in as the dependency; however, if the dependency object is returned from another function defined in some other file you’ll just have to rinse and repeat until you come across the original definition. This is well below the bar for “professional work”. Problems like these arise every single time I try to work with Nix, and it becomes an enormous time sink. Docker is pretty shit, but there’s a pretty clear upper bound to the time I’ll spend struggling with it. Not so with Nix.
I agree actually, you describe the issues I've had with nix quite head on. I've not ran into such issues every single time i try it, but I have hit upon a good deal of issues of the kind you describe. Nix is by no means perfect, and if I was smarter I'd try to remake it with a stronger type system, but the basic premise is useful enough on it's own to warrant usage IMO
I’ve thought a lot about a type system for Nix. Typing the mix expression language would improve some things, but since so much of what people do with the Nix expression language is writing scripts that take in files and transform them into other files, you would really want a type system for the derivations which could describe the “shape” of the input and output files. I’m not aware of any such type system, but it would be a really interesting area of research. Would love to know if others have thought about this or not.
As far as I know, the only official chat channels is #nixos (and #nixos-* friends) on Freenode (https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Get_In_Touch). There is an unofficial Discord, but I'd advice you to join the IRC channels instead, fast help and the people contributing to Nix actually hangs around as well.
