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Comment by erokar | Hacker News Reader

Completely agree. I much prefer the ML syntax to ALGOL-like syntax.

Nice thing is, Reason converts lossless to OCaml, so all the ML fans can profit from the money FB pouring into the ecosystem.

Would it not have been much more pragmatic for FB to have collaborated with MS instead on F# support in dotnet core? That seems more practical given the context that F# can directly benefit from things like concurrency support in dotnet core.

Of course, F# has not always been the favorite lovechild of MS, but the OCaml ecosystem does not seem to be in a particularly stellar state either.

We already use ocaml to write Hack, Flow and Infer, so just from a corporate standpoint, this move to incrementally adopt more of a language that's had many success stories internally makes sense.

From an individual standpoint, there are some unique aspects of OCaml that we like a lot. The properties of BuckleScript for example (tiny output, great js interop, fast simple compilation).

No doubt that the ecosystem could be improved, but that's what we're here for and what we're willing to do.

"the OCaml ecosystem does not seem to be in a particularly stellar state"

Maybe that's a good thing for Facebook?

> Of course, F# has not always been the favorite lovechild of MS, but the OCaml ecosystem does not seem to be in a particularly stellar state either.

I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to, but OCaml has been around and used for real work for much longer than F#. I'm not sure it's so clear cut.

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