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Comment by bayesian_horse | Hacker News Reader

I've heard good things about OCaml, but it's extremely niche.

I am in no way a OCaml fan, and I primarily use Go at work.

That said, the fact that OCaml is used by Bloomberg and Facebook (on multiple apps and products) alone make it not niche http://www.ocaml.org/learn/companies.html

That plus ReasonML's growing popularity, which is essentially just a syntax extension of OCaml, makes it even further not niche.

Oh I don't doubt, that SOMEONE is using these nice languages. Still, the community of OCaml or Haskell is not nearly as big and diverse as the Python community.

And that counts in all sorts of ways. You'll have much more trouble finding answers to any questions you have. You'll have less chances for community meetings or educational content. You'll definitely have more trouble finding new developers for your projects, both in business and in open source.

Again I am not trying to be a contrarian, but in my experience quantity != quality. You can take this statement the other way and say too much information is bad. There is a reason there are so few Go Stack Overflow questions and answers: most of Go's documentation is excellent and easy to follow and learn and they have excellent community resources, videos and guides. From what I have seen so far, the OCaml and Reason docs are great, and their communities are extremely supportive.

Sure, but that was just an example to illustrate my point. Some of these languages are viewed as hard to learn simply because they are unfamiliar. But to someone who's never programmed before, all languages are unfamiliar, and it turned out, at least in Jane Street's case, that OCaml was easier for the business people to understand than Java or C#, or even Excel macros.

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