Re: Guix pronunciation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Laura,

Laura Lazzati <address@hidden> skribis:

>> As for those wondering why: “Guix” is initially just the contraction of
>> Guile + Nix.
> Thank you for the explanation. The person I met interested in at least
> playing whith Guix told me that was thinking of both Guix and Nix, and
> I was asked before about the differences. Is it in the manual? Because
> I don't remember reading it.  Maybe it could be added, before the
> pronunciation, WDYT?

Nix and Guix have technical similarities, in the same sense that Debian
and Fedora have technical similarities, but the projects have different
goals, priorities, commitments, and processes.  Guix is committed to
user freedom and to building software from source, for instance.

Nix and Guix have also significant technical differences arising from
the use, in Guix, of a single general-purpose language for everything,
with embedded domain-specific languages (EDSLs) as needed.  That, in
turn, makes the system very hackable and extensible, and that’s what
makes it easy to write several UIs (CLI, Emacs, web), simple UIs, new
tools around Guix like ‘guix pack’ or the Guix Workflow Language, etc.

I wrote about the initial vision regarding the programming language
approach in <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.4584.pdf>.  Ricardo wrote a more
up-to-date and more comprehensive answer on HN:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18910683>.

Should we write this more prominently somewhere?  Probably!  :-)

Ludo’.