My First Steps with Nix
Nix, depending on the context, can refer to a programming language, a package manager or a Linux Distro.
Personally, I’m most insterested in the package manager aspect and the promise of it being able to create declarative, reproducable development environments. With a configuration file and the nix develop command you can activate a kind of “virtual environment” that contains not just your Python packages - but any program defined by the configuration!
I find that idea particuarly exciting when working on a language server like esbonio, since it needs to be able to work against a variety of Python versions, Sphinx versions, as well as various code editors and all their versions! Having the ability to define a particular configuration and have some tool automatically recreate it would be amazing.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s see if I can get to a point where I can easily test esbonio against a range of Python versions.