Nix is one of the few pieces of software I trust. I use it on just about every computer I work on — awful.systems is managed and deployed by just nixos-rebuild and a deployment flake, as are almost all the computers in my house (including a few embedded into the house itself). in general it makes both software development and configuring Linux a lot more fun compared with the traditional way of doing things
I often call Nix fucking incomprehensible, but it doesn’t need to be. Zero to Nix is one of the documentation projects that’s intended to be a more gentle goal-oriented introduction to Nix concepts, and it’s definitely worth following along if you’re curious about Nix and want to be able to do something useful with it right away
if you end up liking Nix and want more of it, NixOS is an entire Linux distro configured and managed by Nix, and it’s incredibly powerful and stable. I run it on a full-fat gaming PC as my primary OS and the experience of running it is surprisingly very good; feel free to ask and I’ll summarize how I run stuff like games on NixOS
as far as I know Perl is almost entirely gone, but the Nix interpreter is still C++. in the long tradition of functional programming though, the Nix language itself is becoming more powerful as the C++ interpreter becomes more of an implementation detail most folks don’t need to mess with
for what it’s worth, I never have the spoons to deal with C++, so I’m happy to say that all in all my years of screwing with Nix I’ve never had to use anything but the Nix language and bash (and potentially whichever language I’m writing packages for)