Nix – taming Unix with functional programming

You may be aware of Nix or NixOS. Users love it for being a superior tool for building, deploying, and managing software. Yet, it is generally perceived as notoriously hard to learn. In an attempt to provide an alternative learning approach, this article discusses the Nix package manager (hereafter simply referred to as Nix) and its underlying principles in the context of the history of computing. The condensed findings presented here reflect only some of our ongoing community effort1, started this year to improve documentation and make the benefits of Nix more accessible to software developers, and eventually computer users in general.