jon-wood parent
I’m yet to be entirely sold on that, mostly because I think Nix the language isn’t anywhere near as accessible as Dockerfiles, but I’ll be the first one cheering if Nix does manage to take over.
Completely agree on the complexity criticism, but this interactive tutorial (that literally embeds a full nix interpreter in the browser) went a looooooong way towards making Nix files not just look like arcane incantations to me, and doesn't take very long to do:
if at some point you realize "oh... this is just JSON with a different syntax, some shorthands, and anonymous or library functions," you're on the right path
You might be interested in Devbox (http://jetpack.io/devbox)! We built Devbox because we were frustrated with our Docker based dev environments, and our goal is to provide the power of Nix with a more accessible interface (similar to yarn or other package managers).
We're open source and rapidly adding features, you can check us out on Github at https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox