[peter_d_sherman]

>"But NixOS isn't the only declarative distro out there. In fact GNU forked Nix fairly early and made their own spin called Guix, whose big innovation is that, instead of using the unwieldy Nix-language, it uses Scheme. Specifically Guile Scheme..."

I'd be curious if a list exists of all declarative Linux distros out there, along with the configuration language (Nix, Scheme, etc.)

I'd also be curious as to how easy it would be to convert Scheme to the Nix language or vice-versa, in other words, it seems to me that there might be a "parent language" (for lack of a better term) out there for all lisplike and functional programming language (a subset of Haskell, F#, or some other functional programming language perhaps) that sort of might act as an intermediary conversion step (again, for lack of a better term!) between one functional or lisplike programming language and another...

Probably unrelated (but maybe somewhat related!) -- consider Pandoc... Pandoc is a Haskell program that basically uses a document tree structure to convert between one type of document format and another... maybe in terms of programming languages you'd call that an AST, an Abstract Syntax Tree... so maybe there's some kind of simplified AST (or something like that) out there that works as the base tree for all functional and lisp-like programming language (yes, lisp/lisplikes sort of preserve its/their own tree; their own AST -- via their intrinsic data structure, and that would seem to be true about functional programming languages too... so what is the base tree/AST of all of these, that all languages in this family can "map on to" (for lack of better terminology), that could be used (with AI / LLM's) as an "Intermediary Language" or "Intermediary Data Structure" (choose your terminology) to allow easily converting between one and the other?

Anyway, if we had that or something like that, then Nix configurations could (in theory) be easily converted to Guix, and vice-versa, automatically, as could any other Linux configured by a functional and/or lisplike language...

That, and I found the article very interesting!

I may have to try Guix in the future!

[arikrahman]

I was thinking the same thing. Since scheme is in the Lisp family, it should be straightforward to modernize it to something like Clojure, which is similar to Haskell as you mentioned. Being functional, but from a Java/Lisp ecosystem that might be more viable in the typical modern software environment.

[ssivark]

Wouldn't that just make it harder to bootstrap an OS, needing to start with JVM and all...

[Pay08]

Is there a need to "modernise" it?

[anthk]

With Lisp you already have an AST.