Fix the learning curve.

I love Nix and NixOS and have used them for years, but it always feels like I am stuck in beginner level when it comes to understanding the language.

The biggest obstacle is pedagogic. I think big wins can be make by creating an up-to-date, deep-dive learning resource. I get the suspicion that one must learn Nix in a somewhat different way than one learns other languages. But I don't know what this method should be, and I wish somebody showed it to me.

Admittedly, some of the difficulty relates to the Nix language itself. I got excited when I saw a gist [1] by Eelco Dolstra that 'naturalize' aspects of the Nix language by bringing them down a level of abstraction. I am disappointed this isn't discussed so often in the community. Making configurations and packages explicit parts of the language - as Eelco suggests - is certainly going to help us mere-mortals understand what is going on in Nix. But syntactic improvements that makes Nix feel more like YAML are also huge: familiarity is a cornerstone of intuitiveness.

Please twaeg - make this happen!

[1] https://gist.github.com/edolstra/29ce9d8ea399b703a7023073b0d...