Why We Use OCaml

1) It's practical - for our team, we had developed in it before and had deployed a large system in it - we could get to where we wanted quickly.

2) we think it's a competitive advantage (see OP and PG's Beating the Averages essay) - additionally, since we deal with large amounts of data, OCaml was particularly helpful in that regard too

3) OCaml is a good filter - the thing that matters more to us is a person's elasticity of learning - their ability to learn new things. We use the right tool for the right job, so we also use javascript, java, objective-C, etc. OCaml is a pretty good filter and test for elasticity of learning.

Lastly, not a primary reason, but an advantage - languages get popular because the companies that use them are popular (i.e. gain market traction and can pay developers). That doesn't mean it's the most efficient way to get things done. We'd like to be part of the group that helps make the industry more efficient.

> That right there should tell you something.

I wouldn't use that as the main criteria to judge a language. C has a poor standard library (for a definition of "poor" relative to, say, python) and so does C++. But they are certainly useful tools in their domains.

In any case, OCaml has a couple of standard library replacements/augmentations that reduce the gap a bit. (Batteries Included [1] and Jane Street's Core [2])

[1] https://github.com/ocaml-batteries-team/batteries-included/

[2] https://github.com/janestreet/core and https://github.com/janestreet/core_kernel

You should bear in mind that OCaml represents almost twenty years of continuous development (see the history chapter in Real World OCaml [2]), with a community steeped in some of the most cutting edge technology in modern programming languages (e.g. the Coq theorem prover or the CompCert certified C compiler).

I was the startup manager at XenSource that took the risk, and all of your points were not true for us:

- by joining the Caml Consortium (very cheap), we got access to the core developers and a yearly face-to-face. We're talking about Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez here. Do you get that with Java?

- the compiler and runtime are utterly rock solid and engineered for a modern Unix environment. We found more serious gcc bugs (5+) than OCaml bugs (one, to do with compiling functions with >32 arguments, and was already fixed in trunk and a backport available inside a day).

- Hiring OCaml developers gave us the cream of the crop even for entry level jobs, and I work with several of the original team that we assembled to this day. See the paper [1] for details on several of the responses from within the company and how we responded.

- The OCaml community is very pragmatic, since the language is used in quite a few large codebases like Coq, CompCert, Why3, XenServer, Pfff (Facebook) as well as closed-source codebases such as Jane Street and Lexifi's. Most language evolution discussions are evaluated against these large users. I consider OCaml rather unique in that, despite being a small community, the ones that do use it do so seriously and often at scale.

I find it amusing that so-called "risk-averse" startup managers discount a 20-year old language with legendary stability in favour of relatively new languages. Nothing beats having developers that deeply understand their language and libraries, and that's only imparted with age and stability.

I would also note that being based in Cambridge, it's quite easy to grads that know ML (and the same is true in many US universities that teach OCaml, like Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Yale).

[1] http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2010-icfp-xen.pdf

[2] https://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/prologue.html#a-brief-...