I’m a lot more optimistic than I was 10 days ago. The recent drama seems to have unlocked an explosion of effort and interest in diversifying the ecosystem (apologies for mixed metaphor.) I’m sure a fair chunk of those efforts will seem very naive or unnecessarily ‘political’ to some people, and I’m guessing a fair fraction of the people and projects will eventually fall by the wayside. But I still have hope that when the dust settles the upstream project will have de-stagnated, and that there will be a selection of interesting re-implementations, forks, etc dotted around the landscape.
What is the drama around Nix? I tried looking it up and going to their github issues section but I didn’t see anything about any problems with the project.
Funny thing about that. I had a very vague knowledge about it, so, when your question prompted me to remedy that, I googled “Nix drama” for a lack of a better starting point and turned up this repo, explicitly meant to summarize it:
It’s just from one perspective, of course (insert Babylon 5 quote about three truths here), but it should be a good jumping-off point for finding more keywords to google. (i.e. Wikipedia without the reputation for upholding NPOV.)
(The only detail I’d heard of specifically was the bit about part of the NixOS community pressuring the hosting university to shut down NixCon unless they dropped the sponsorship from a military contractor, and then not having the leverage to do it the following year.)
Wow. So I guess it’s mostly about Nix’s tooling and infrastructure being shoddy and the maintainers not accepting better solutions? That makes sense to me, Nix is a great concept but everything about it feels like a Great Value™ project, it reminds me of other projects built by stubborn devs who insist on reinventing the wheel and then making a square. Even the Nix language itself feels like a rough draft of a language, like even before you start the prototyping stage. It’s not explicitly bad, just feels… strangely over-simplified, almost like an esoteric language. I’m with srtcd424, I’m actually more excited to see how the forks evolve.
Or at least add hyphens: auto; -webkit-hyphens: auto;
It’s ironic that we multiply giant matrices on the GPU to generate a word of text, and yet don’t have half-decent line-breaking algorithm deployed on the web.
This doesn’t really help & can hurt readability to break in the middle of the word. Hyphens were used not to increase readability to save paper or maximally fill an element shape for a magizine–where screens don’t have page limitations as you can infinitely scroll down & rarely is filling a shape a goal on the web . Hyphens are more taxing to calculate as well. Without having better algorithms to clamp letter spacing to like page layout software, the web will always not do justification in a pleasing manner. The alternative is simpler: use the default justification & the default hyphenation. Notice that Reader Modes, optimized for reading, use those defaults too.
Oh no. I got to read it on my desktop screen & they aren’t setting max-inline-widths either. Currently the text is running at about 120 characters per line, when optimal reading is in the 55–65 character per line range.
I sure hope nix (or a fork at least) survives
I’m a lot more optimistic than I was 10 days ago. The recent drama seems to have unlocked an explosion of effort and interest in diversifying the ecosystem (apologies for mixed metaphor.) I’m sure a fair chunk of those efforts will seem very naive or unnecessarily ‘political’ to some people, and I’m guessing a fair fraction of the people and projects will eventually fall by the wayside. But I still have hope that when the dust settles the upstream project will have de-stagnated, and that there will be a selection of interesting re-implementations, forks, etc dotted around the landscape.
What is the drama around Nix? I tried looking it up and going to their github issues section but I didn’t see anything about any problems with the project.
Funny thing about that. I had a very vague knowledge about it, so, when your question prompted me to remedy that, I googled “Nix drama” for a lack of a better starting point and turned up this repo, explicitly meant to summarize it:
https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained
It’s just from one perspective, of course (insert Babylon 5 quote about three truths here), but it should be a good jumping-off point for finding more keywords to google. (i.e. Wikipedia without the reputation for upholding NPOV.)
(The only detail I’d heard of specifically was the bit about part of the NixOS community pressuring the hosting university to shut down NixCon unless they dropped the sponsorship from a military contractor, and then not having the leverage to do it the following year.)
Wow. So I guess it’s mostly about Nix’s tooling and infrastructure being shoddy and the maintainers not accepting better solutions? That makes sense to me, Nix is a great concept but everything about it feels like a Great Value™ project, it reminds me of other projects built by stubborn devs who insist on reinventing the wheel and then making a square. Even the Nix language itself feels like a rough draft of a language, like even before you start the prototyping stage. It’s not explicitly bad, just feels… strangely over-simplified, almost like an esoteric language. I’m with srtcd424, I’m actually more excited to see how the forks evolve.
That link is accurate IMO, and I’ve been involved in the Nix community for a long time and have been following most of the details of the drama.
Aside, but man do folks need to stop using justified text. The rivers on small viewports make this dizzying to read.
Or at least add
hyphens: auto; -webkit-hyphens: auto;It’s ironic that we multiply giant matrices on the GPU to generate a word of text, and yet don’t have half-decent line-breaking algorithm deployed on the web.
This doesn’t really help & can hurt readability to break in the middle of the word. Hyphens were used not to increase readability to save paper or maximally fill an element shape for a magizine–where screens don’t have page limitations as you can infinitely scroll down & rarely is filling a shape a goal on the web . Hyphens are more taxing to calculate as well. Without having better algorithms to clamp letter spacing to like page layout software, the web will always not do justification in a pleasing manner. The alternative is simpler: use the default justification & the default hyphenation. Notice that Reader Modes, optimized for reading, use those defaults too.
Oh no. I got to read it on my desktop screen & they aren’t setting max-inline-widths either. Currently the text is running at about 120 characters per line, when optimal reading is in the 55–65 character per line range.