Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–15 of 15 posts

Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#11

Post by didibus »

zulu314 wrote: post #5

reasonML / reasonML + bucklescript amount to about 25%, it's been out for 4 years while CAML was out for 30+. Yet the wording makes it sound like it's disappointing "used by only 25%", "maybe the survey was not advertized enough in the Reason community". Actually, the fact that someone can show up with a transpiler that makes the language curly braces friendly and get 25% market share just like that is just puzzling.

Ya it's crazy how syntax can impact popularity like that. ReasonML is the same compiler, sample semantics, just a different coat of paint and it's already gaining more popularity than OCaml in the same timespan.

Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#12

Post by nextos »

nv-vn wrote: post #3

I'm a little disappointed that there's so little analysis on the free form questions. I can't remember what I answered, so I was looking through some of these free form questions to try and identify my comments. I kept thinking something had to be me because it's word for word the same thoughts that have gone through my head 100s of times as a long-time OCaml user. Unfortunately, it feels like these are getting ignor…

I'm also a longtime Ocaml user, albeit a sporadic one.

I think the language is potentially becoming interesting as a statically typed data analysis platform. I don't see any good competitor in the area. I would love to be able to perform longer analyses in a statically typed platform, and transition to a production system without having to change languages. I think lots of people have similar needs.

The OWL libraries are surprisingly good despite having very little developer mass behind them. Of course the whole ecosystem is tiny in comparison with Julia, let alone Python. I wonder if large users like Jane Street have their own private Ocaml implementations of the equivalents to NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Pandas, Keras.

Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#13

Post by readarticle »

didibus wrote: post #11
zulu314 wrote: post #5

reasonML / reasonML + bucklescript amount to about 25%, it's been out for 4 years while CAML was out for 30+. Yet the wording makes it sound like it's disappointing "used by only 25%", "maybe the survey was not advertized enough in the Reason community". Actually, the fact that someone can show up with a transpiler that makes the language curly braces friendly and get 25% market share just like that is just puzzling.

Ya it's crazy how syntax can impact popularity like that. ReasonML is the same compiler, sample semantics, just a different coat of paint and it's already gaining more popularity than OCaml in the same timespan.

Have to consider the context though, I’d point to it being a front end NPM compatible language from the same FAANG that React is from (vs a language from French academics that’s used in less popular domains) before curly braces.

Elm uses a more traditional ML syntax and AFAIK is more popular than Reason, though that’s complicated by it not using React and both of them being dwarfed by Typescript.

Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#14

Post by maattdd »

nextos wrote: post #12
nv-vn wrote: post #3

I'm a little disappointed that there's so little analysis on the free form questions. I can't remember what I answered, so I was looking through some of these free form questions to try and identify my comments. I kept thinking something had to be me because it's word for word the same thoughts that have gone through my head 100s of times as a long-time OCaml user. Unfortunately, it feels like these are getting ignor…

I'm also a longtime Ocaml user, albeit a sporadic one. I think the language is potentially becoming interesting as a statically typed data analysis platform. I don't see any good competitor in the area. I would love to be able to perform longer analyses in a statically typed platform, and transition to a production system without having to change languages. I think lots of people have similar needs. The OWL libraries…

Dunno, but one of their employee (Laurent Mazare) is actively making OCaml bindings for various data science libraries (such as https://github.com/LaurentMazare/ocaml-torch or https://github.com/LaurentMazare/ocaml-matplotlib)

Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#15

Post by maddyboo »

I wish they would have collected more demographic information.

It would help both to determine how representative the survey was of the greater OCaml community, and also to ascertain the diversity of the community itself. Being rather niche, there is certainly going to be underrepresentation of certain groups.

It would be helpful to be able to compare the results to similar data covering the demographics of other language communities like Haskell and Rust, and the wider software/tech field.

I also feel like the distribution methods and sample size of the survey likely skewed the results significantly. The survey window was relatively short and the choice to distribute the survey through discuss.ocaml.org and some mailing lists definitely missed a lot of other segments of the community.

I find it funny that one of the questions asks where people interact with the community, and a large number of respondents answered discuss.ocaml.org. Well of course they do! That was one of the few noted places the survey was advertised!

In the end I agree with one of their conclusions:

> It would be ideal to delegate the formatting of the survey and the summarization of results to professionals.

But I would add that ‘distribution and administration’ to that list .

Post reply on HN