It's really fast, has minimal boiler plate and supports functional programming without any of the "orthodoxy" of Haskell. That is, you can write a recursive function but also write a for loop.
Imagine something that can compete with C and C++, but doesn't require all of the low-level reinvention and memory management. It's like a high-level language for smart people that doesn't feel entirely impractical. It has some things that people bitch about (like having to use +. to add two floats and + to add two ints), which don't really bother me that much.
If it were more popular and had better libraries/platform support (unless that's changed drastically in the past year or so), it would be a serious contender for general development. Being completely honest, I think Jane Street is probably the biggest organization pulling OCaml, and from a navel-gazing standpoint you can either view that as good or bad.
Use it because you learned it and thought it didn't suck, I guess?
> "... unless that's changed drastically in the past year or so ..."
Actually a lot has happened in the last year or so. If you're not aware of it, you could start by looking over the end-of-year post from OCaml Labs [1]. I'm aware that it's difficult to keep a central overview of all the progress but there is a lot of work being done, in many ways, to improve the ecosystem.
Whoa, that's cool. I had no idea people were still working on it at that level. The last thing I saw was a version of OPAM that didn't seem to work that well...I'll have to go look around.
I think we're pretty clearly the most intense user (most code, most developers using it), but not technically the biggest company using it. Bloomberg and Facebook are examples of bigger companies using it in serious ways.
Imagine something that can compete with C and C++, but doesn't require all of the low-level reinvention and memory management. It's like a high-level language for smart people that doesn't feel entirely impractical. It has some things that people bitch about (like having to use +. to add two floats and + to add two ints), which don't really bother me that much.
If it were more popular and had better libraries/platform support (unless that's changed drastically in the past year or so), it would be a serious contender for general development. Being completely honest, I think Jane Street is probably the biggest organization pulling OCaml, and from a navel-gazing standpoint you can either view that as good or bad.
Use it because you learned it and thought it didn't suck, I guess?
EDIT: changed some phrasing