Ask HN: Is there a Nix without the functional programming bit

I really like the idea of Nix, but I never understood why it uses the functional programming approach. As a great fan of the procedural programming paradigm, I feel that a better version of Nix could be build around a more mainstream language. Surely, you'd need some ideas of functional programming, but I don't see why a package manager/OS of this type couldn't benefit from a language that looks much more like Python or C++.

Does such a thing/project exist (even if only in beta)?

(I last looked at Nix two years ago.)