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How do you feel about the progress OCaml since you started using it? What is your general prognosis for the future? Are you by chance getting paid to write OC

by zumu 8y ago

How do you feel about the progress OCaml since you started using it? What is your general prognosis for the future? Are you by chance getting paid to write OCaml? If so, how hard was it to find opportunities.

nv-vn 8y ago
1. It's definitely been slower than I would have liked. A lot of developments have been hyped up a lot, when in fact they are years away. Modular Implicits (which approximates Haskell's type classes) and Multicore have been in the works since only a little bit after I started using the language. At the time, they were kind of described to me as being "right around the corner" but failed to appear. There have certainly been lots of good additions to the language apart from this (e.g. we got a great inliner called Flambda), but it seems like it's still gonna be >=6 months before Multicore lands and possibly a year or more before Modular Implicits makes its way into the mainline compiler. 2. I think it's kind of a bittersweet future. I think growth is decelerating for OCaml because of ReasonML/BuckleScript making it really easy to get started with OCaml and use web libraries. This is great because it brings exposure to the language, but I think it's caused a number of people to switch over from native to web, which means abandoning some of the OCaml libraries for their web versions. OCaml has a great native backend and it's really a shame for me to see it fade away, but I think in the long-run that's probably going to happen. Still, I think popularity of Reason will continue to go up and that will bring OCaml into the mainstream for hopefully long enough to garner some attention and get people to take the native backend seriously. 3. I'm currently working for equity at a very small startup I co-founded but we're using ReasonML for the web side of things. Previously, I was at an internship where I had a lot of freedom to use whatever I wanted and was paid to write some software in OCaml. I think finding a job writing OCaml is rather difficult, but introducing it in a job (especially for internal tools or web development with Reason) is much, much easier. The "big" OCaml jobs seem to all be at companies where it's really hard to find employment (Jane Street, Facebook, Bloomberg), but occasionally you'll see some smaller ones pop up online.
- zumu 8y ago
  Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful answers. I'm going to keep hacking away at OCaml, but measure my expectations a little and perhaps start looking into Reason as well. A couple questions wrt Reason: Do you find it easy to switch between OCaml / Reason? I personally find the syntax of Reason a little unnecessary. Do you use ReactReason or some other framework -- perhaps the Elm-like 'tea' package?

by zumu 8y ago

nv-vn 8y ago

1. It's definitely been slower than I would have liked. A lot of developments have been hyped up a lot, when in fact they are years away. Modular Implicits (which approximates Haskell's type classes) and Multicore have been in the works since only a little bit after I started using the language. At the time, they were kind of described to me as being "right around the corner" but failed to appear. There have certainly been lots of good additions to the language apart from this (e.g. we got a great inliner called Flambda), but it seems like it's still gonna be >=6 months before Multicore lands and possibly a year or more before Modular Implicits makes its way into the mainline compiler. 2. I think it's kind of a bittersweet future. I think growth is decelerating for OCaml because of ReasonML/BuckleScript making it really easy to get started with OCaml and use web libraries. This is great because it brings exposure to the language, but I think it's caused a number of people to switch over from native to web, which means abandoning some of the OCaml libraries for their web versions. OCaml has a great native backend and it's really a shame for me to see it fade away, but I think in the long-run that's probably going to happen. Still, I think popularity of Reason will continue to go up and that will bring OCaml into the mainstream for hopefully long enough to garner some attention and get people to take the native backend seriously. 3. I'm currently working for equity at a very small startup I co-founded but we're using ReasonML for the web side of things. Previously, I was at an internship where I had a lot of freedom to use whatever I wanted and was paid to write some software in OCaml. I think finding a job writing OCaml is rather difficult, but introducing it in a job (especially for internal tools or web development with Reason) is much, much easier. The "big" OCaml jobs seem to all be at companies where it's really hard to find employment (Jane Street, Facebook, Bloomberg), but occasionally you'll see some smaller ones pop up online.

zumu 8y ago
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful answers. I'm going to keep hacking away at OCaml, but measure my expectations a little and perhaps start looking into Reason as well. A couple questions wrt Reason: Do you find it easy to switch between OCaml / Reason? I personally find the syntax of Reason a little unnecessary. Do you use ReactReason or some other framework -- perhaps the Elm-like 'tea' package?