> I've long thought OCaml was weirdly suppressed. My (somewhat rambling) 2cents, since I started working on improving this via OCaml Labs. - Poor tooling: OCa

> I've long thought OCaml was weirdly suppressed. My (somewhat rambling) 2cents, since I started working on improving this via OCaml Labs. - Poor tooling: OCaml (and ML) is taught at a number of institutions so undergrads do have experience of it, yet few places seem to use it in production. The stories I heard of how they had to manage their systems would have put me off from ever wanting to learn it. OPAM, and the new tooling around it has changed all that. - Fragmented community (outside academia): Of those who've used OCaml, there are those who love the language but they may end up feeling a bit isolated as they're unaware of others who can help/support them. They either soldier on alone or move on to something else. This shouldn't be surprising if you believe the 1/9/90 rule -- 1% make/do stuff, 9% use/participate and 90% just consume. I'm suggesting that the quiet 90% aren't really aware of each-other's existence and don't progress into the 9%. The work around refreshing ocaml.org, CUFP, more blogging etc is helping this. - Missing 'killer app(s)': Using a language for it's own sake isn't very compelling. There need to be tools or products that people (devs) find impressive or cool that have been written using OCaml, where it was clearly the right tool for the job. This drives interest in the language with a purpose and encourages people to make/contribute things. I believe Mirage OS, Hack and recently Flow have helped this (as well as the effort of those projects to actively disseminate their work - see above comment). With the above in mind, I had a couple of thoughts in the early days of OCaml Labs (I'm sure these weren't original). Thought 1: Improve on all the above and existing users who've quietly appreciated the language will feel more confident in revealing themselves to support a growing ecosystem. Thought 2: If thought 1 is true then some of those, who've come out to support the ecosystem can feel more confident in advocating for it and draw in new users. Combined with the above, this sets up a virtuous cycle. As a result, I'd expect to see more stories on HN, Reddit, Twitter elsewhere that refer to OCaml, either as a language or because of tools built with it. In other words, this shouldn't be a fad but merely revealing another option to solve certain kinds of problems.