[Nix-dev] Use Haskell for Shell Scripting

[Joe Hillenbrand]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 8:36 AM, Domen Kožar <domen at dev.si> wrote:

> If you want to impose on people to learn Haskell and Nix to contribute,
> you're going to end up in a lonely island. Remember, Nix tries to be
> approachable to everyone and that's why it's minimal and simple.
>

I'll never buy the circular argument that "Haskell's not popular because
Haskell's not popular." I think people would be encouraged to learn Haskell
if Nix was using it to great success. From what I've seen, a huge chunk of
the existing Nix community are Haskellers because they understand the
benefits of purity. I think if there is a clear benefit to a superior tool,
it should be used, though I'm not entirely convinced there are a huge
benefit to using Turtle.

On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 5:07 PM, Oliver Charles <ollie at ocharles.org.uk>
wrote:

> Not sure if you're serious...
>

I'm not sure if I am either. I'm just curious what people think about the
possibility.

I'd imagine that the startup overhead is now higher than bash, and the size
> of closures goes up a lot (you have to pull in the many hundreds of MB that
> GHC needs).


Given those concerns another option could be shell-monad[1][2], which
outputs shell script, so you get some of the safety benefits of Haskell
with none of the overhead. Maybe it would be a good middle ground.

[1] http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/shell_monad_day_3/
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/shell-monad
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