$ whois nix

Nix

first released in 2003 · by Eelco Dolstra

$ guessprog --inspect nix

year: 2003
paradigm: functional
family: other
memory: automatic gc
binding: dynamic
safety: weak

NIX(7)

AUTHORS: Eelco Dolstra
HISTORY: Eelco Dolstra created Nix in 2003 as a research project at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and described it in his 2006 PhD thesis "The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model". The idea is to treat building software like evaluating a pure function: each package is described by a lazy, functional Nix expression and stored under a hash of all its inputs, so different versions never clash. The Nix language exists to write those descriptions, and later grew into the basis of a whole Linux distribution, NixOS.
USAGE: A niche but fast-growing language, used almost exclusively to describe packages, development environments and system configurations for the Nix package manager and NixOS. Its package collection, Nixpkgs, is one of the largest software repositories in existence.
SEE ALSO: Nix on Wikipedia ↗

$ cat default.nix

# A function from a package set to a build recipe (a derivation)
{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:

let
  greeting = "Hello from Nix";
in
pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation {
  pname = "hello-script";
  version = "1.0";
  dontUnpack = true;
  installPhase = ''
    mkdir -p $out/bin
    echo 'echo "${greeting}"' > $out/bin/hello
    chmod +x $out/bin/hello
  '';
}