miniblog.

The most common selling point I hear for Nix is having a list of all the packages you need. On a traditional Linux distro, I just install things and forget about them. A curated, commented list would certainly be handy when I have a new system.

There are *so many* ways that reading a text file can fail. Maybe it doesn't exist, it's a broken symlink, it's actually a directory, it's not the encoding you expected, or perhaps you just don't have the correct permissions. Reporting good errors is surprisingly labour intensive.

I'm working on arity errors in Garden, my toy programming language. Rather than just saying "expected 3, got 4 arguments", I'm trying to report where the extra argument is, or what extra argument was expected.