But there is a strong community behind OCaml. A lot of undergraduate programs use a dialect of ML for their core classes.
While most OCaml implementations have poor standard libraries, Jane Street Capital has released several open source libraries that make it easy to implement high quality, performant applications.
>I don't understand your response. Are you saying the OCaml community primarily consists of undergraduates?
What I am saying is that a sizable portion of academia uses a variant of ML. Maybe it hasn't caught on in industry, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a community that uses it.
> That right there should tell you something.
A lot of development of core tools for mainstream languages comes from the companies that use them. Clang and LLVM, for example, received support from Intel, Google and Apple just to name a few.
Jane Street has reimplemented much of the OCaml standard library for their own purposes. Facebook has already started implementing tools in Haskell. Once functional languages gain more traction, I suspect that the tools will improve substantially.
> What I am saying is that a sizable portion of academia uses a variant of ML. Maybe it hasn't caught on in industry, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a community that uses it.
Academic communities tend to be scattered when it comes to software and the primary focus is on publishing papers rather than producing software that is useful to others. Also, I know a number of skilled academics that use functional languages, but they tend not to have an interest in changing into the industry, rather stay at university. So I wouldn't depend on them as source for recruiting.
Of course there are exceptions, e.g. OCaml Labs seems to be keen on producing well-written, usable software that can be used in industrial settings. The development of Mirage is a pretty exciting area.
Yeah. The movers and shakers in software are always the big companies. But there are quite a few institutions that feature functional programming in their undergraduate curriculum.
One of the main gripes that people mention with functional languages is that it can be difficult to find developers. Several good universities are pouring out competent programmers.
>> While most OCaml implementations have poor standard libraries
> That right there should tell you something.
I wouldn't use that as the main criteria to judge a language. C has a poor standard library (for a definition of "poor" relative to, say, python) and so does C++. But they are certainly useful tools in their domains.
In any case, OCaml has a couple of standard library replacements/augmentations that reduce the gap a bit. (Batteries Included [1] and Jane Street's Core [2])
While most OCaml implementations have poor standard libraries, Jane Street Capital has released several open source libraries that make it easy to implement high quality, performant applications.