That's definitely the most painful part of iterating on Nix code for me, even in simple configs. You eventually develop an intuition for common problems and rely more on that than on deciphering the stack traces, but that's really not ideal.
Actually, thats a reason why I never even touched Nix. Besides, being functional and all the hype, but the syntax and naming of the language feels ad-hoc enough for me to never have caught on...
... but you do get an error. That's a lot better what you typically get with C or C++. Assuming it's valid systax, of course.
This is a veering off topic, but I do agree that Nix-the-language has a lot of issues.
(You might suggest Guix, but I don't want to faff about with non-supported repositories for table stakes like firmware and such. Maybe Nickel will eventually provide a more pleasant and principled way to define Nix configurations?)
I tried some kind of BBC micro at a computer museum, and found out that if you had an error anywhere in your BASIC program, it would just print "error". No line number, no hint at what the problem was.
I could understand some kind of ancient system not having the detail or knowledge to explain what happened in particular, but this is something that still happens in a lot of Microsoft software in particular.
Outlook has a consistent tendency to give you errors like "Couldn't get your mail for some reason", or Windows saying "Hey networking isn't working". No "connection timed out" or "couldn't get an IP address" or "DNS lookup failed" or any other error message that is possible to diagnose. Even the Windows network troubleshooting wizard (the "let us try to diagnose why things aren't working for you" process) would consistently give me "yeah man idk" results, when the error is that I'm not getting an address from DHCP and should be extremely easy to diagnose.
I get that in a lot of cases, problems cut across lots of errors or areas of responsibility, and getting some other team making some other library to expose their internals to your application might be difficult in an environment like Microsoft, but it's just inexplicable that so much software, even these days, resorts to "nope can't do it" and bail out.
Haha, reminds me of some Scheme interpreter that would just say something like 'missing paren' at position 0 or EOF depending on where the imbalance was :)
... but, yeah... I'm pretty sure there could be some hints as to whereabouts that infinite recursion was detected.
