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Comment by sargun | Hacker News Reader

I'm really excited about reason. The front end community is adopting functional programming (concepts) at breakneck speed. I think this opens us up to more advanced type systems, and generative testing (property testing, say).

These are exciting times.

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Pretty much. The goal of Reason is to make some weighted compromises* in order to allow folks (like you?) to have an easier time convincing your colleagues that OCaml's a good bet, disregarding their past experiences with similar languages. For example, being scarred by FP assignments back from university is one of the top feedbacks. If we show that ReasonReact allows folks to write apps just the same, plus a familiar syntax that makes the first tries easier, then you yourself can skip over all these bikesheddings and help your colleagues further.

* Having a different syntax isn't without cost for the existing OCaml community, but so far most have been very supportive

> being scarred by FP assignments back from university is one of the top feedbacks

It's funny, seeing awesome FP assignments in SML and OCaml is one of the few things that makes me really want to go back and do a computer science degree. Alas, it seems like functional languages are disappearing from universities one by one these days, only to be replaced by Python or Java.

You (and I) are definitely in the minority here. "Go back and do a computer science degree" is probably the opposite wish of lots of software engineers, in terms of quantity.

From what I know, there are at least three classes in some universities (forgot the names) whose professors/TAs told me they were teaching Reason to decent success. Reason's also used in this users study: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.07583.pdf. Reason removes the unfamiliarity part in order for them to get to the core of the research, which is still done in OCaml.

Don't lose hope! =)

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