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I guess hindsight is 20/20, but even though I think OCaml is a really endearing language, I would not build my startup on it, for the reasons everybody else is

I guess hindsight is 20/20, but even though I think OCaml is a really endearing language, I would not build my startup on it, for the reasons everybody else is saying! I don't have time to shave yaks with respect to database access, cloud storage, etc. The savings in just going over to GCP or AWS and filtering your "potential languages" by the list of supported languages seems impossible to overestimate. If you want something with more safety machinery than Go (and I get it, so do I), I think your real choices for a language that needs to interact with cloud providers are something on .NET, or something on the JVM - you pick one, and you go solve your actual problems instead of having to write your own stdlib. I'd be way more open to experimenting on the front-end with buckle->rescript or similar, where I'm leveraging existing JS libraries and don't have to worry about high quality database drivers.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
It seems really questionable to take on ANY new language if you're trying to build a business. If you're building a gaming business, you had better use C++, C, or C#. If you're building a business that might need to use the cloud, look at the supported languages where your chosen cloud has an sdk and pick one of those. If you're building something for Windows avoid programming languages that only have Unix implementations. Etc. Other choices are just onboarding unnecessary risk.
- blandflakes 6y ago
  Yeah definitely feeling on the same page. I've seen a lot of writing on the web about "novelty" budgets, etc. I know people argue that really expressive languages are a secret weapon (and I definitely think that Java as I was writing it years ago wasted a lot of my time), but I think haven't a great ecosystem is also a (not secret, but) secret weapon.
- sweeneyrod 6y ago
  I'm sure that by new you meant obscure, but OCaml has been around for 24 years.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Right, I did mean obscure/non-mainstream. Thanks for the correction.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

It seems really questionable to take on ANY new language if you're trying to build a business. If you're building a gaming business, you had better use C++, C, or C#. If you're building a business that might need to use the cloud, look at the supported languages where your chosen cloud has an sdk and pick one of those. If you're building something for Windows avoid programming languages that only have Unix implementations. Etc. Other choices are just onboarding unnecessary risk.

blandflakes 6y ago
Yeah definitely feeling on the same page. I've seen a lot of writing on the web about "novelty" budgets, etc. I know people argue that really expressive languages are a secret weapon (and I definitely think that Java as I was writing it years ago wasted a lot of my time), but I think haven't a great ecosystem is also a (not secret, but) secret weapon.
sweeneyrod 6y ago
I'm sure that by new you meant obscure, but OCaml has been around for 24 years.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Right, I did mean obscure/non-mainstream. Thanks for the correction.