Oddbean

@jb55 @vivab0rg I use guix for the lisp magic, its one of the most interesting code bases I've spent time in, if not the most interesting. but it is more "raw" than nix, it exposes much more to the user, assumes less in the way of "sane defaults", and demands that you spend time reading the code, so users should generally have at least some interest in the idea of a distro conceived as a tower of compilers and interpreters, and what that entails. in terms of pointers concerning where to start, considering you seem to understand the basics of the functional deployment model already, I would say definitely read the Dissecting Guix blog series[1], as well as Spritely's Scheme Primer[2] to get a succinct overview of modern scheme programming. getting setup to hack in scheme is also important[3], and I'd recommend learning a structural editing mode like lispy (vim kbds, what I use), parinfer, or paredit, which is allows you to program in a way that makes manipulating symbols feel more like working with clay (but not necessary, there are guix maintainers who do not). getting comfortable with "guix repl", preferably opening it in emacs or vim, is also one of the most important things, so that you can explore guix interactively[4]. and then you should learn to use g-exprs[5], first just building and populating little directories in /gnu/store, and then compiling and running small programs. once gexprs "click", I imagine you'll be both convinced by #guix while also ready to start becoming productive using. [1] https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/dissecting-guix-part-1-derivations/ [2] https://spritely.institute/static/papers/scheme-primer.html [3] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/The-Perfect-Setup.html [4] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-repl.html [5] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/G_002dExpressions.html