Huh, I actually think it's the opposite. Classic Linux distros like debian are much more like Lisp, everything is the same big mutable pile of state and you query and edit it from within the system itself. The REPL is just your shell. It's very live and interactive and a bit scary at times.

NixOS by contrast takes the entire Linux userland and makes it an immutable, dead compiler artifact. So it is to debian like C or Rust are to Lisp.

I never made that connection, it makes sense though!