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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

I'm shocked, shocked to hear there's such little ML going on in France. After discovering OCaml and its progenitor INRIA, I've always just assumed that MLs and functional programming was more of a European thing, especially since they're more oriented toward proofs and program correctness, which I also thought was more a characteristic of European CS and software engineering. But no?

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There are pockets here and there, like INRIA and the Scala people around Odersky in Lausanne, Switzerland. But it's not something on a larger scale. I think Erlang is somewhat prominent in some places, too.

Especially the Lisp community seems to be almost completely American to me (in Europe), with Racket in Boston, SBCL from CMU, and Clojure, too. What's going on in Lisp development in Europe?

OCaml is still quite academic, Caml-light (Caml without object and with some difference) is used to teach CS in some Math undergrad and it is use by academic researcher who don't want to go back to C. That's said there is not so much Engineering/Commercial use of it. (Some blame INRIA for not pushing it, supporting it enough, especially the lack of extended library and threading trouble).

As said earlier, we are using OCaml at Citrix.

Demand for OCaml and F# people here is insane right now. I just turned down a £390k job offer.

One workplace != France != Europe

2 workplaces plus a good deal of acquaintances, in fact. In my niche (custom technical or scientific software, mostly for the government), I'm 99% confident that ML makes less than 0.1% of currently written code. 80% of my colleagues even never heard of ML.

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