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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

The sunk cost fallacy at Jane Street is strong.

Maybe it's sunk cost fallacy for them. But without them there wouldn't be a language that gets me 80/20 benefit/effort of Rust.

what is the sunk cost fallacy in the Jane Street case?

I said "maybe" as granting the root comment's premise - I don't believe that.

You can also argue it's "Stockholm syndrome". Anyway,it's funny how opinions differ: I still consider Rust to be a poor man's OCaml.

Why? They have one of the largest Ocaml codebases in the world. It has clearly work out VERY well for them, in terms of productivity and pure ROI in features and revenue.

Ocaml has so much good going on, even being a less known language.

I assume you are a rust fanboy, and i want to see just how long your smirk holds when you compile a 20M LOC project that takes 45 minutes.

I've never written a line of Rust in my life, but I unfortunately had the great displeasure to write OCaml.

OCaml is a terrible choice for (anyone) a company like this. They NEED to be able to hire the very best of the best, but choosing an exotic language that is less palatable than a plate of shit and more cryptic than alien hieroglyphs restricts your talent pool A LOT.

I'm not saying people cannot learn it, I'm saying people won't want to, for multiple very good reasons (it sucks, it's not at all transferable skill, etc.).

Thats BS. I have learnt Ocaml and im far from "the best if the best". Its just syntax in the end, took me a few weeks to get productive enough to ship features.

Rust on the other hand, takes usually way longer to grok, mostly because of its borrow checker that is quite unique to rust.

This is not at all what I said. At least we can agree on the fact that you're far from being the best of the best with that reading comprehension...

>They NEED to be able to hire the very best of the best,

This is literally why they've chosen Ocaml. Yaron Minsky has often stated that interest in a language like this is effectively a filter and magnet for extremely smart and curious people, he credits Ocaml with being an advantage in that regard.

They don't care about transferable skills either. People at Jane Street earn hundreds of thousands per year starting out, virtually nobody ever leaves, you're set for life after a decade there.

Aso Ocaml is a pretty standard ML. If you think it's unreadable alien hieroglyphs its fair to say you're not the demographic they're trying to attract, so the system is working.

Well said mate. Couldn't have said it any better.

Wait til you hear about PHP at Meta...

did they talked about it publicly ? i stopped following around the hiphop vm era

What are you talking about?

The implication here, I think, is that "Jane Street has foolishly invested heavily into Ocaml and, rather than sensibly change course and migrate away, they continue to invest heavily into it in the hopes that one day the investment will pay off."

Which is a ridiculous take: Jane Street has done extraordinarily well for themselves, possibly at least in part because of their investment in Ocaml, and any sort of migration would be a huge undertaking, and an absurd and unnecessary risk.

Ah yeah, that is absurd, given how successful they have been, and how much they attribute that success to their technical decisions.

People love to sulk in their parochial pits, I guess?

Thanks for clarifying :)

Maybe Jane Street succeeds because of the people who are good at finance in spite of the people who like OCaml.

I do think Jane Street fell into a sunk cost fallacy when they first stuck to OCaml. But after having invested further into an OCaml/OxCaml codebase, teams and tooling, switching tech stacks has lost most of its value.

Also, their efforts benefit me greatly as an OCaml (now maybe OxCaml) user, so I'm glad they took that path.

I dunno. Jane Street started using OCaml back in 2002. Consider the world of programming languages back then: no Rust, of course...but, like Java wouldn't even have generics for another two years! At the time - and for a long time after - OCaml's offering of power/performance was pretty unbeatable. It arguably still is, but I think there's at least an argument these days. I'm not sure exactly when that argument became viable, but it would've been long-after Jane Street had already built up a pretty huge codebase and a pretty crack team of OCaml engineers.

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