Comment by sgeisenh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgeisenh | Hacker News Reader

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>I don't understand your response. Are you saying the OCaml community primarily consists of undergraduates?

What I am saying is that a sizable portion of academia uses a variant of ML. Maybe it hasn't caught on in industry, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a community that uses it.

> That right there should tell you something.

A lot of development of core tools for mainstream languages comes from the companies that use them. Clang and LLVM, for example, received support from Intel, Google and Apple just to name a few.

Jane Street has reimplemented much of the OCaml standard library for their own purposes. Facebook has already started implementing tools in Haskell. Once functional languages gain more traction, I suspect that the tools will improve substantially.

Not really disaggreeing with you but,

> What I am saying is that a sizable portion of academia uses a variant of ML. Maybe it hasn't caught on in industry, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a community that uses it.

Academic communities tend to be scattered when it comes to software and the primary focus is on publishing papers rather than producing software that is useful to others. Also, I know a number of skilled academics that use functional languages, but they tend not to have an interest in changing into the industry, rather stay at university. So I wouldn't depend on them as source for recruiting.

Of course there are exceptions, e.g. OCaml Labs seems to be keen on producing well-written, usable software that can be used in industrial settings. The development of Mirage is a pretty exciting area.

Yeah. The movers and shakers in software are always the big companies. But there are quite a few institutions that feature functional programming in their undergraduate curriculum.

One of the main gripes that people mention with functional languages is that it can be difficult to find developers. Several good universities are pouring out competent programmers.

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