I think because of community interest and the need for a good general-purpose, efficient language. Here are some interesting community-developed projects:
No, but realistically it's not very accessible (general-purpose). If people go for OCaml that's great, it's an amazing language and it's obviously the same language. But the ReasonML focus has been on developer experience and it's showing.
Can functional programming really be made more accessible by adding curly brackets? I came from C-style languages and now much prefer the syntax of Haskell and OCaml (although Haskell is my favourite). Learning the syntax was trivial compared to the paradigm and semantics.
Sorry, the developer experience in OCaml is almost unsurpassed. Nearly everything is perfect in that area, the only thing I miss are a couple of features (for example, native compiler support for all stdint.h exact width types).
Could there perhaps be some things that other mainstream developers need to do that you don't? Maybe, say, quickly scaffold a project with a CLI? With unit tests and a documentation pipeline out of the box? Access online documentation about packages in a centralized location? Easily sandbox library dependencies for multiple projects, while sharing as much as possible?
All that said, the OCaml tooling is definitely making strides in the right direction. Dune for one thing is incredible and we are lucky to have it. I'm just saying there is room to make things easier for developers, and Reason is also moving that forward.
- A cross-platform native-compiling GUI library with a React-influenced design: https://github.com/revery-ui/revery
- A lightning-fast Node version manager: https://github.com/Schniz/fnm
- Erlang-like multicore actors: https://github.com/ostera/reactor
That said, it's early days and the ecosystem has to (and will) mature a lot.