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Comment by swah | Hacker News Reader

OCaml is a great language, but IIRC the creators didn't talk much to the community, about where they were going, etc. Contrast with Clojure, Golang, Python... So many people steer away and go bet on something else.

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The conversation between the OCaml creators and the community is a lot more focussed. Back in 2005 when we were developing the Xen toolstack using OCaml [1], I subscribed Xensource to the Caml Consortium [2]. This let us meet with the main team once a year, and air our concerns in a structured way. This is so much easier to handle than a firehose of e-mails. Nowadays I still attend the annual Consortium meeting, but more in a capacity of reporting on our activities at OCaml Labs and there are still a healthy set of industrial users who like this mode of interaction.

[1] http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2010-icfp-xen.pdf [2] http://caml.inria.fr/consortium/

caml-light was a marvellous language to teach computer science (I have learned it in 1992). It was interpreted bytecode. Later "Caml Special Light" has improved its speed. More later OCaml has added objects. There is a good history at http://caml.inria.fr/about/history.en.html#idp1416640 .

The purpose of the language was research and teaching. I think it was never intended to be "battery included". The fact that so many people use it for real work and that so many libraries have been developed has a simple explanation: the difficulty to find a good language to have the job done. OCaml is a very good language.

I think it is easier to learn OCaml than haskell. Scala is more recent than OCaml and is more "battery included". I think that Scala will progressively replace OCaml and it a better fit for professional work.

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