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Comment by zulu314 | Hacker News Reader

reasonML / reasonML + bucklescript amount to about 25%, it's been out for 4 years while CAML was out for 30+.

Yet the wording makes it sound like it's disappointing "used by only 25%", "maybe the survey was not advertized enough in the Reason community".

Actually, the fact that someone can show up with a transpiler that makes the language curly braces friendly and get 25% market share just like that is just puzzling.

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The majority of the Reason/ReScript community for sure did not fill out this survey. There is a large selection bias for OCaml. One of the obvious indicators: 191 of the respondents work in banking/finance sector.

So? Bucklescript was invented at Bloomberg IIRC

It was created originally at Bloomberg but I've never heard of that level of adoption internally in BBG. Nowadays from what I've seen the highest adoption is at various web devs in Europe and US.

Ya it's crazy how syntax can impact popularity like that. ReasonML is the same compiler, sample semantics, just a different coat of paint and it's already gaining more popularity than OCaml in the same timespan.

Have to consider the context though, I’d point to it being a front end NPM compatible language from the same FAANG that React is from (vs a language from French academics that’s used in less popular domains) before curly braces.

Elm uses a more traditional ML syntax and AFAIK is more popular than Reason, though that’s complicated by it not using React and both of them being dwarfed by Typescript.

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