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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • object oriented

    Python does have OOP but you are not at all forced to use it. You can write code in a functional or even procedural style.

    typing

    I do hate that python doesent have proper support for typing but I think weakly typed variables will actually help beginners as it is less to think about to start off with.

    indentation

    I think there are pros and cons here. In other languages it is considered good style to use indentation anyway.

    I’m sure it is difficult to teach a large class like that though. It was hard enough for me to learn with a much more favourable teacher to student ratio than you probably have. Sorry but honestly I do sympathise with admin as well.


  • NixOS:

    • Largest and most up to date package repository (no need for flatpack/appimage/snap ect)
    • Reproducible
    • Declarative
    • Rollbacks you can select at boot time
    • No dependency conflicts

    I think it will easily be the number 1 distro if/when they can :

    • the steep learning curve (e.g. have a gui installer EDIT: As in a GUI software centre)
    • documentation
    • have more tools use nixos and have nixos in mind (e.g. there are a couple of tools that didn’t work for me because of specific C libraries not beeing present/configured on nixos that are present on other distros. some libraries implicitly expect these to be present).



















  • That seems like an argument for maintaining a frozen repo of packages, not against containers.

    I am not arguing against containers, I am arguing that nix is more reproducible. Containers can be used with nix and are useful in other ways.

    an argument for maintaining a frozen repo of packages

    This is essentially what nix does. In addition it verifies that the packages are identical to the packages specified in your flake.nix file.

    You can only have a truly fully-reproducible build environment if you setup your toolchain to keep copies of every piece of external software so that you can do hermetic builds.

    This is essentially what Nix does, except Nix verifies the external software is the same with checksums. It also does hermetic builds.





  • Are you saying that nix will cache all the dependencies within itself/its “container,” or whatever its container replacement would be called?

    Yep, sort of.

    It saves each version of your dependencies to the /nix/store folder with a checksum prefixing the program name. For example you might have the following Firefox programs

    /nix/store/l7ih0zcw2csi880kfcq37lnl295r44pj-firefox-100.0.2
    /nix/store/cm1bdi4hp8g8ic5jxqjhzmm7gl3a6c46-firefox-108.0.1
    /nix/store/rfr0n62z21ymi0ljj04qw2d7fgy2ckrq-firefox-114.0.1
    

    Because of this you can largely avoid dependency conflicts. For example a program A could depend on /nix/store/cm1bdi4hp8g8ic5jxqjhzmm7gl3a6c46-firefox-108.0.1 and a program B could depend on /nix/store/rfr0n62z21ymi0ljj04qw2d7fgy2ckrq-firefox-114.0.1 and both programs would work as both have dependencies satisfied. AFAIK using other build systems you would have to break program A or program B (or find versions of program A and program B where both dependencies are satisfied).


  • You might be interested in this article that compares nix and docker. It explains why docker builds are not considered reproducible:

    For example, a Dockerfile will run something like apt-get-update as one of the first steps. Resources are accessible over the network at build time, and these resources can change between docker build commands. There is no notion of immutability when it comes to source.

    and why nix builds are reproducible a lot of the time:

    Builds can be fully reproducible. Resources are only available over the network if a checksum is provided to identify what the resource is. All of a package’s build time dependencies can be captured through a Nix expression, so the same steps and inputs (down to libc, gcc, etc.) can be repeated.

    Containerization has other advantages though (security) and you can actually use nix’s reproducible builds in combination with (docker) containers.