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Comment by dismalaf | Hacker News Reader

Hobby language? Plenty of commercial and important software has been written in OCaml.

Hell, the early versions of the Rust compiler were written in OCaml...

Realistically unless you want to work at Jane Street or Inria (the French computer science lab where Ocaml was made), if you want to use Ocaml, it's going to be as a hobby.

There is also Ahrefs.

You can say that for almost any language that's not C/C++, C#, Java, Python and JS. Rust is just barely beginning to become "corporate". Even Ruby, which is pretty mainstream, has relatively few jobs compared to the big corporate languages.

Non-hobby languages is a narrow club, yes.

Your list is at least missing PHP, Typescript, Swift, Go, Lua, Ruby and Rust though.

But Ocaml really doesn't belong anywhere close to this list.

Ummm Lua? It's a nice little scripting language, but literally never seen a job ad for a job using mostly Lua. It's almost the definition of hobby language...

OCaml runs software that billions use, is used by financial and defense firms, plus Facebook.

But Lua? By that metric I'm throwing in every language I've ever seen a job for...

R, Haskell, Odin, Lisp, etc...

Edit - this site is basically a meme at this point. Roblox is industrial strength but Facebook, Dassault and trading firms are "hobby". Lol.

Also, I'm not dissing Lua, there's just irony in calling Lua industrial but not OCaml...

Lua is widely used for scripting in games. It might not be the main language of the project, but it's still very common.

Roblox apps are built in Lua.

Lua has petered out a bit but it has been used as a scripting and config language for a ton of games and commercial embedded. Not a hobby language, not typically a main implementation language but that doesn’t mean no commercial use. posix/bash shell isn’t a hobby language either, but unless you’re Tom Lord or something (RIP) you’re not doing the entire project in it.

Do realize that luajit for years was bankrolled by corporations.

> But Lua?

Lua, Bash ... these are birds of a feather. They are the glue holding things together all over the place. No one thinks about them but if they disappeared over night a LOT of stuff would fall apart.

As others already pointed out, Lua is used in tons of video games as the scripting language.

The most famous example being World of Warcraft, but it's far from the only one. If you play, or have played, games, you almost certainly have run software built with Lua without realizing it.

It's not because a language isn't relevant in your personal coding niche that it's not industrially relevant.

I'm simply pointing out the irony in calling a (mostly game) scripting language like Lua "industrial" while calling a language used by FAANG, defense companies and finance companies a "hobby" language.

There's no irony, bash and VB6, no matter what you think about the quality of the said languages, are also scripting language and neither are in the “hobby language” category as their use is (or was) very broadly distributed.

OCaml's use is comparatively very, very narrow.

And, in case you are wondering, I have absolutely nothing again OCaml. In fact, my first ever programming language was, as a significant fraction of French engineer from my generation, the “Lite” dialect of Caml. And I suspect that its OCaml heritage is a significant fraction of the reason why I love Rust.

But being used by exactly one FANG company, a single finance one and allegedly a defense company (aren't you confusing Dassault System with Dassault Aviation ?) isn't enough to change its status, especially when it's not the dominant language in two of those (AFAIK Jane Street really is the only one where OCaml has such a central place).

Dassault Systèmes makes defense software, among other things... https://www.3ds.com/industries/aerospace-defense

Dassault Aviation makes the planes themselves. All Dassault companies are under one umbrella anyway.

The OCaml website lists a bunch of other users.

In my opinion, none of that really matters, any single one of those uses proves it's utility... Facebook Messenger alone is probably used by more people than every piece of Lua software ever made though.

There's a funny small list of true claims in your message above…

First, Dassault Systèmes doesn't fall "under one umbrella" with Dassault aviation, it is an independent public company (with the Dassault group having minority shares in the company). And just because a software company has defense related products doesn't make it a “defense company”, nobody would ever call either IBM or Microsoft “Defense Companies”.

Then Facebook doesn't seem to be using Ocaml in Facebook Messenger, and instead uses its standard tech stack for that (the Hack PHP derivative).

The fact that Facebook has a developer-facing team building internal development tools with OCaml doesn't suffice to change the status of a language: since there are barely any Ocaml developers at Facebook, an Ocaml enthusiast would have to be very, very lucky to land an Ocaml job there…

And that's the whole point of the “hobby language” status: can you land a job using it or not, and Ocaml simply isn't that kind of language. And again, France has been teaching Ocaml to at least a hundred thousands of students over the years.

LuaJIT is widely used for writing Nginx plugins.

Speaking of Ruby, its usage has cratered down in the past decade: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1

Well, it was hyped beyond belief at one point... Kind of nice that it's back to being niche, I'd hate for it to become Python or TS.

I kind of like that Ruby is still focusing on single developer/small team productivity.

How may be the wrong word, but it’s definitely a niche language and significantly less software is written in it

Maybe I’m wrong, but I only really know of Jane Street for OCaml, meanwhile FAANG all has at least some rust code.

Also I would argue the rust compiler started as a hobby project

Also Bloomberg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278553

Facebook Messenger's backend was/is OCaml... React was originally written in SML, then OCaml, then whatever it is now. And a bunch of places use it for various things.

https://ocaml.org/industrial-users

React is and has always been javascript…

Not what the author of React says:

> Yes, the first prototype of React was written in SML; we then moved onto OCaml.

> Jordan transcribed the prototype into JS for adoption; the SML version of React, however great it might be, would have died in obscurity. The Reason project's biggest goal is to show that OCaml is actually a viable, incremental and familiar-looking choice. We've been promoting this a lot but I guess one blog post and testimonial helps way more.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209814

Sure, a prototype of an idea that would eventually become React was rewritten into JS to create the initial seed of the software that would eventually be called React.

React was never written in SML or Ocaml. It was originally called FaxJS, and the source code is published online.

A version of React was built to run in ReasonML, which is a flavor of Ocaml for the web, but Reason didn't even exist before React was fairly well established.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209814

That's a nonsensical point, though. Building a proof of concept in a language and then rebuilding the practical implementation of it in another language and runtime doesn't make the two the same thing. If Notch had built a proof of concept of Minecraft in Python before building the Java version, we wouldn't say Minecraft was originally written in Python. There wasn't even a robust way to compile OCaml for the web in 2010/2011 even if you wanted to try to use the same code. My understanding is that zero SML or Ocaml related to React ever ran in production, which makes the assertion that it was used in anything other than an academic capacity moot.

Hell, Facebook's own XHP's interface (plus PHP/Hack's execution model) is more conceptually relatable to React, and its initial development predates Jordan's time at Facebook. It wasn't JavaScript, but at the very least it defined rails for writing applications that used the DOM.

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