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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

> OCaml fares pretty poorly at these (e.g., tooling, ecosystem, community, pace of improvement, mindshare, etc).

I think this is unfair and OCaml has a lot going for itself. The fact that it also has an active academic community of people who care about Fancy Type Systems does not strike me as an intrinsic downside.

To me, OCaml has a very different paradigm from most languages, and that can be a big strength. Implementing something in OCaml after you've written out the types can feel like you are doing a duet with the compiler.

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Setting up an OCaml build system for the first time is an absolute nightmare. There are a number of tooling issues with OCaml that require a lot of work to figure out and work around. It is not batteries-included, either.

Once set up, though, I agree that it drives very much forward. In compiler writing in particular, it allows you to express the things you care about (ASTs and transformations over them) with next to no effort.

A few years ago this was still true, but since then Dune (originally called jbuilder) has dramatically changed the ease with which OCaml projects can be set up.

As for batteries included, there are several options for foundational libraries; I found there to be too many choices rather than too few when I first started developing in OCaml.

Maybe things have progressed in the intervening years, but I found dune/jbuilder to be complicated and poorly documented. I've forgotten many of the issues I had with it, but IIRC there were a couple of different configuration formats (S-expressions and something else?) and the examples online never worked out of the box.

As for foundational libraries, I agree that there were too many choices, but IMO fragmentation in the standard library is a bad thing (you need to know how to interop between them as you integrate third party libraries that use different standard libraries). Never mind the confusion that creates for newbies.

Moreover, for newbies, getting editor integration working well, understanding the unfamiliar (to put it nicely) syntax, and a myriad of other challenges without good documentation are other significant obstacles.

These are pretty significant downsides, and as much as I like the upside of a nice type system, I don't need it to build a product, but I need good tooling and a good ecosystem and a healthy supply of developers. I can ship a product with Go or Python (languages with impoverished type systems)--there might be more bugs but finding and fixing bugs is manageable--but OCaml presents significant challenges.

> The fact that it also has an active academic community of people who care about Fancy Type Systems does not strike me as an intrinsic downside.

No one is arguing that this is a downside. The downside is that there aren’t many people who care about making useful software, or at least there is a relative dearth of content devoted to that end.

> To me, OCaml has a very different paradigm from most languages, and that can be a big strength. Implementing something in OCaml after you've written out the types can feel like you are doing a duet with the compiler.

I actually agree with this, but as much as I love a good type system, it’s gravy. I can ship software with Go because it has a decent runtime, tooling, ecosystem, learning curve, mindshare, etc even despite its simplistic type system; however, it’s much harder to do the same in OCaml. Also, there are languages like Rust with great type systems and concern about the more ruggedly practical concerns of software development.

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