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Tean years ago I moved to Silicon Valley from London to work at a hardware company. I realized pretty quikly that I wanted to do software not hardware. Algebrai
by gip 5y ago
Tean years ago I moved to Silicon Valley from London to work at a hardware company. I realized pretty quikly that I wanted to do software not hardware. Algebraic datatypes, static typing, ..., were also more natural to me than OO and classes. So I 'learned' OCaml in a week, applied to a software dev job at a startup and got hired (I got extremaly lucky obviously). My secret love was Haskell and I later joined companies using Haskell in production. I then transitioned to engineering management.
Long story short - my experience has been that OCaml (and Haskell) are often better phased out as the maturity of the team grows. I hope that one day I that will change - but as of today I would not advise a startup to bet on functional languages like OCaml. Happy to elaborate as to why if there is some interest.
I'm looking forward to hearing from people who disagree; and more importantly, have built successful products in OCaml.
- moonchild 5y ago> Happy to elaborate Please do.
- mands 5y agoAgreed, have used both OCaml and Haskell in production and have founded startups using them. For startups we discovered you're in a much stronger position using languages with big ecosystems and communities - we're using Python and Django now, but would happily use Java or .NET in the future. Still using OCaml for side projects tho!
- SinParadise 5y agoThat's quite the "long story short". You went from a love of ML and Haskell to not recommending it in the second paragraph. Please elaborate because that is quite the leap.
- yawaramin 5y agoWhat do you consider 'successful'?