FP isn't a new thing in academia. But having it used in practical conditions, by companies intended to make money and writing "normal" software (i.e. not thing

FP isn't a new thing in academia. But having it used in practical conditions, by companies intended to make money and writing "normal" software (i.e. not things related to formal semantics), is still really newsworthy. And that's OCaml's appeal IMO: it focuses on things that aren't sexy to academics. Good compiler performances due to careful codegen rather than exotic theories, willingness to be "polluted" by side-effects rather than wrangling monad transformers, eager evaluation to get predictability rather than cute code...