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Comment by craigsmansion | Hacker News Reader

I hope it never happens. Ocaml is now in that sweet spot where it's big enough for real work, but can ignore mainstream fashions and keep out the inevitable accompanying "how to program when you cannot" crowd.

The last thing Ocaml needs is mainstream attention. FB's "Reason" being a point in case: "Since I don't understand what I'm doing, can you at least make the syntax look familiar?"

Let the masses stick to writing UX-driven apps in Javascript. It's where the money is anyway, which seems to be the primary motivation for "software engineers" these days.

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I absolutely abhor this elitism. If something is truly worth it, it should be accessible to the "masses". The polish and QA investment mass adoption provide make for much more solid products. It's not like Ocaml would be sold in stores, next to Coke Light.

"The polish and QA investment mass adoption provide make for much more solid products."

That's pretty much untrue unless by polish you mean "pretty but pointless IDEs and buzzword/checkbox compliance."

Ocaml is already very accessible, just on its own terms.

I guess this is a sort of:

> Unix is user-friendly — it's just choosy about who its friends are.

> Anonymous, in The Art of UNIX Programming (2003) by Eric S. Raymond

At the end of the day, each community chooses its path. If Ocaml makes you happy how it is now, more power to you :)

> Ocaml is already very accessible, just on its own terms.

i.e., "ocaml is already very accessible to people who know ocaml"

Why do you abhor elitism? It's elitism (not group thinking) which yields progress. For instance, da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, etc. and all the Nobel price winners were all outstanding elitists.

> If something is truly worth it, it should be accessible to the "masses"

OCaml is accessible to the masses, for 10-20 years already.

I doubt that the masses will switch to FP languages (OCaml, Haskell, Lisp, ...) ever since the classical lightweight languages (Javascript, PHP, ...) provide anything they need for their basic stuff. Only few need more, and they have free choice of several nice niche languages which don't need to become mainstream.

> Why do you abhor elitism? It's elitism (not group thinking) which yields progress. For instance, da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, etc. and all the Nobel price winners were all outstanding elitists.

We're here because of mass progress, not because of a few "chosen people". The "great man" theory of history fell by the wayside a one century ago.

> We're here because of mass progress

What is "mass progress"? There are two options: a) let the masses learn to use the inventions of individualists (which happened with C/C++, PHP and Python for instance), or b) let the inventions be customized to the mediocre capabilities of the masses.

You want option b), obviously. I wouldn't call that "progress".

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