[smabie]

Though Haskell is nice in many ways, I would choose OCaml for a commercial project over Haskell any day. OCaml is ruthlessly practical and the culture around it is was one eminent pragmatism.

Ocaml is designed to get stuff done, and the tooling and ecosystem strongly reflect that.

If something was going to kill Haskell, it would OCaml, not Javascript or some other language.

I would feel very comfortable running a business on OCaml, Haskell, not so much.

[codygman]

> Though Haskell is nice in many ways, I would choose OCaml for a commercial project over Haskell any day.

As a counter-point I'd say the opposite: I choose Haskell :)

> OCaml is ruthlessly practical and the culture around it is was one eminent pragmatism.

Is this a plus? Practical and pragmatism seem to be unlaterally considered a positive, but when does "pragmatism" just start to mean "unprincipled"? There's much talk about when being too principled gets in the way of getting things done, but I'm wondering what your position on the opposite is here.

What are your thoughts on 1) Real-world thinking 2) first-principles thining and 3) the balance of each that is ideal in software-engineering?

> Ocaml is designed to get stuff done, and the tooling and ecosystem strongly reflect that.

Haskell was designed to get stuff done too, just maybe not quite the same way. If you ever had an inkling of "maybe people in industry are outright dismissing research too fast" you might like it.

>> If something was going to kill Haskell, it would OCaml, not Javascript or some other language.

> I would feel very comfortable running a business on OCaml, Haskell, not so much.

I'd feel comfortable with either. I agree it'd have to be something at least as strongly typed as Ocaml to kill Haskell as well.

[smabie]

I think I came off as too pro-Ocaml. I personally think OCaml has a ton of problems, and like you suggest, is unprincipled. Features are added with very little thought, and OCaml code can get very ugly trying to replicate the kind of power Haskell has built in.

But, all in all, I like OCaml more than Haskell. Laziness by default is a mistake and GHC's ever growing list of language variants is kind of stupid. Moreover, Haskell's monad based effect system is a lot less useful than people think it is. In my mind, the main benefit of tracking effects is to enable aggressive compiler optimization, not increased safety.

Haskell's effect system imposes a heavy burden on the developer, with little benefit.

Ocaml imposes almost no burden in doing whatever the hell you want, but the language is messy and full of decades of hacks and eye sores.

I'm one of the rare souls that actually likes OCaml's OO system and I actually think that the language would be a lot better if the standard library and other code leveraged it. As it stands, functors aren't expressive enough for many use cases and function as shitty classes.

Here's what I want from a functional language:

Something that looks like OCaml, but get rid of the functors, cleans up the syntax, supports HKT, supports function polymorphism, supports easy to write macros (ppx is so fucking shitty), and make it have Nim like OO call syntax. Every function that takes a type as it's first argument can be called as a method using the dot syntax.

Also, have the language compile to a native executable, and make the executable and runtime really really small. OCaml gets a lot about performance right, but the 20mb executables (no tree shaking) is unacceptable.

[codygman]

> OCaml is ruthlessly practical and the culture around it is was one eminent pragmatism.

Also, in case Ocaml turns out to be a better fit for any future projects I have a question:

What is the biggest advantage constituted in part or primarily from it's ruthless pragmatism?

[smabie]

I would say a rock solid runtime with a focus on consistent performance, a nice C ABI, and low memory usage. Haskell suffers in non-trivial use cases and the is very hard to profile. Laziness has never worked correctly and in my view is a big mistake. Laziness is a dead-end, despite all the elegant code it allows you to write.

Also the tool chain is miles better than Haskell. I'd even say that the build/package management and editor tooling is some of the best of any language.