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.

In 2021, a workshop was convened at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to explore potential applications of formal methods and programming language theory to software platforms being developed in the life sciences. The vision to host this workshop at the Broad Institute originated in conversations about economic incentives, the exponential growth of multi-modal data sources, and challenging biomedical problems that have resulted in the life sciences emerging as both key consumers and producers of software and AI/ML technologies [1-4]. We view this next decade as a critical growth phase for this process and an opportunity to shape the software engineering culture of the life sciences from the ground up. Safety and security, realized through both informal and formal methods, are central to this goal [5-7]. The result of these conversations was the event Formal Methods for the Informal Engineer (FMIE), a workshop aimed at highlighting recent successes in the development of verified software.