[_6hmp]

OTOH an interesting language can be a recruiting draw. It probably helped them recruit engineers who were interested in the distributed systems and concurrency problems they were trying to solve. See for example Jane Street with OCaml.

[edit: oops, thanks for the heads up on the spelling :)]

[Zababa]

OCaml is old and reliable, and I think it was already proven to work in the industry when Jane Street chose it. Even if it wasn't the best programming language ever, it was still a strong choice at the time, and still is. Pony on the other hand was and still is very young. I'm not saying it's a bad choice, but it's definitely not the same risk profile as OCaml.

It's just OCaml by the way, for Objective Caml. Unless you're talking about the secret Irish fork /s.

There's a nice page on the official website about the history: https://ocaml.org/learn/history.html.

[wk_end]

> I think it was already proven to work in the industry when Jane Street chose it.

Not really. Outside of Jane Street OCaml has scarcely been proven to work in the industry now. As a big OCaml fan and former OCaml professional, I say this lovingly: it was (and remains) popular in academia and that's mostly it. And Pony is roughly as old now as OCaml was when Jane Street started using it.

The actual reason OCaml's risk profile was much lower was because it effectively has the backing of the French government and academy, which is quite the boon.

IIRC Jane Street chose OCaml basically because Yaron Minsky was brought on as CTO, he had worked with it in school and was a fan of it, and they knew that for the sort of work they were doing OCaml would give them an edge (speed of development and runtime efficiency) and they calculated that its relative obscurity and poor community support wouldn't be a liability for the sort of work they were doing. And remember that it was the year 2000 - Perl was basically the only language with the sort of library ecosystem (CPAN) that is expected of languages now: poor community support was much less of a liability then.

[Zababa]

> Outside of Jane Street OCaml has scarcely been proven to work in the industry now.

I think it depends on what you're working on. If you're building anything that looks like a interpreter/compiler, it's probably one of your best bets. If you're working on stuff that needs a lot of libraries, and relatively obscure ones, it's probably one of your worst bet. If you need good interaction with Windows, it's probably not a great choice either. The businesses I know, which are mostly SaaS, would probably fall under "not the best choice, use with caution". If that's the general case, I agree with you.

> The actual reason OCaml's risk profile was much lower was because it effectively has the backing of the French government and academy, which is quite the boon.

I wonder how much Jane Street benefited from that. The classes préparatoires are still using OCaml to this day (or at least were 3 years ago), and that's usually the best students of France. I've also heard that Facebook recruited quite a lot, for Hack and Flow.

> And remember that it was the year 2000 - Perl was basically the only language with the sort of library ecosystem (CPAN) that is expected of languages now: poor community support was much less of a liability then.

That's a good point. I think OCaml still has a better package manager and build tool than some really popular languages (I'm thinking specifically about Python), but it's hard to beat the ecosystem.

[openfuture]

Maybe they should have used a horse, they are much more reliable than camels and more mature than ponies.

[spooneybarger]

Horses aren't actually more mature than Ponies.

Ponies mature more quickly than horses, they are merely smaller.

https://www.thesprucepets.com/the-difference-between-horses-...

[Zababa]

I'm not sure, AoE2 taught me that camels always win against horses. And if you consider Rust to be OCaml's child (which is kind of true if you really stretch things), it seems like young camels win against young horses too.

[d3nj4l]

It's not a stretch, it's a stated inspiration: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/influences.html

[Zababa]

It is but it's just one of them, hence why I think it's a bit of a stretch.

[shpongled]

I don't think it's a big stretch - I always consider Rust to be in the ML family of languages

[ithrow]

Maybe they should have used a horse, they are much more reliable than camels

Unless you are in a dessert.

[cortesoft]

There is a downside to using an interesting language as a recruiting draw; you are going to get people people who are more interested in the particulars of how you solve a problem than in actually solving the problem.