[Nix-dev] Re: environment.systemPackages

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Eelco Dolstra <e.dolstra at tudelft.nl> writes:

> On 03/04/2011 04:34 PM, Benjamin Franksen wrote:
>> Please forgive my beginner's confusion, I have some problems groking the nix
>> language (the only functional languages I know are all statically typed).
>
> Indeed we can get away with this only because we don't have static typing.

With dynamic typing the situation would be better with an extensible
type system.  Disjoint types could be defined for all the kinds of
objects that are manipulated, rather than using attribute sets and
strings for everything.  This would significantly improve error
reporting, for instance.

The delusion of DSLs...

Thanks,
Ludo’.