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I'm simply pointing out the irony in calling a (mostly game) scripting language like Lua "industrial" while calling a language used by FAANG, defense companies

I'm simply pointing out the irony in calling a (mostly game) scripting language like Lua "industrial" while calling a language used by FAANG, defense companies and finance companies a "hobby" language.

littlestymaar 1y ago
There's no irony, bash and VB6, no matter what you think about the quality of the said languages, are also scripting language and neither are in the “hobby language” category as their use is (or was) very broadly distributed. OCaml's use is comparatively very, very narrow. And, in case you are wondering, I have absolutely nothing again OCaml. In fact, my first ever programming language was, as a significant fraction of French engineer from my generation, the “Lite” dialect of Caml. And I suspect that its OCaml heritage is a significant fraction of the reason why I love Rust. But being used by exactly one FANG company, a single finance one and allegedly a defense company (aren't you confusing Dassault System with Dassault Aviation ?) isn't enough to change its status, especially when it's not the dominant language in two of those (AFAIK Jane Street really is the only one where OCaml has such a central place).
- dismalaf 1y ago
  Dassault Systèmes makes defense software, among other things... https://www.3ds.com/industries/aerospace-defense https://www.3ds.com/industries/aerospace-defense Dassault Aviation makes the planes themselves. All Dassault companies are under one umbrella anyway. The OCaml website lists a bunch of other users. In my opinion, none of that really matters, any single one of those uses proves it's utility... Facebook Messenger alone is probably used by more people than every piece of Lua software ever made though.
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    There's a funny small list of true claims in your message above… First, Dassault Systèmes doesn't fall "under one umbrella" with Dassault aviation, it is an independent public company (with the Dassault group having minority shares in the company). And just because a software company has defense related products doesn't make it a “defense company”, nobody would ever call either IBM or Microsoft “Defense Companies”. Then Facebook doesn't seem to be using Ocaml in Facebook Messenger, and instead uses its standard tech stack for that (the Hack PHP derivative). The fact that Facebook has a developer-facing team building internal development tools with OCaml doesn't suffice to change the status of a language: since there are barely any Ocaml developers at Facebook, an Ocaml enthusiast would have to be very, very lucky to land an Ocaml job there… And that's the whole point of the “hobby language” status: can you land a job using it or not, and Ocaml simply isn't that kind of language. And again, France has been teaching Ocaml to at least a hundred thousands of students over the years.

littlestymaar 1y ago

There's no irony, bash and VB6, no matter what you think about the quality of the said languages, are also scripting language and neither are in the “hobby language” category as their use is (or was) very broadly distributed. OCaml's use is comparatively very, very narrow. And, in case you are wondering, I have absolutely nothing again OCaml. In fact, my first ever programming language was, as a significant fraction of French engineer from my generation, the “Lite” dialect of Caml. And I suspect that its OCaml heritage is a significant fraction of the reason why I love Rust. But being used by exactly one FANG company, a single finance one and allegedly a defense company (aren't you confusing Dassault System with Dassault Aviation ?) isn't enough to change its status, especially when it's not the dominant language in two of those (AFAIK Jane Street really is the only one where OCaml has such a central place).

dismalaf 1y ago
Dassault Systèmes makes defense software, among other things... https://www.3ds.com/industries/aerospace-defense https://www.3ds.com/industries/aerospace-defense Dassault Aviation makes the planes themselves. All Dassault companies are under one umbrella anyway. The OCaml website lists a bunch of other users. In my opinion, none of that really matters, any single one of those uses proves it's utility... Facebook Messenger alone is probably used by more people than every piece of Lua software ever made though.
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  There's a funny small list of true claims in your message above… First, Dassault Systèmes doesn't fall "under one umbrella" with Dassault aviation, it is an independent public company (with the Dassault group having minority shares in the company). And just because a software company has defense related products doesn't make it a “defense company”, nobody would ever call either IBM or Microsoft “Defense Companies”. Then Facebook doesn't seem to be using Ocaml in Facebook Messenger, and instead uses its standard tech stack for that (the Hack PHP derivative). The fact that Facebook has a developer-facing team building internal development tools with OCaml doesn't suffice to change the status of a language: since there are barely any Ocaml developers at Facebook, an Ocaml enthusiast would have to be very, very lucky to land an Ocaml job there… And that's the whole point of the “hobby language” status: can you land a job using it or not, and Ocaml simply isn't that kind of language. And again, France has been teaching Ocaml to at least a hundred thousands of students over the years.