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by nphard85 1566 days ago
And yet there are hardly any software written in Haskell or Ocaml that are widely used or have any notable positive impact on the modern digital world, compared to those written in languages like Go, C++ or Python.

edit: ps: Big fan of OCaml, but have since moved on to Go and Python for getting things done in the real world.

2 comments

OCaml is mostly used in speciality applications. I have a few friends that work on flight control software for satellites and their stuff is all OCaml which is apparently not that uncommon in their field.

That said none of them knew OCaml before joining said company and thus none were hired because of it... so that does somewhat invalidate the "right" people argument but I guess if you are doing literal rocket science I think that is pretty self-selecting for smart folk lol.

FWIW, SpaceX uses C++ for flight control software. It actually makes more sense for such hard realtime applications.
I read somewhere that Elon Musk prefers C, and doesn't appear to be too fond of class-based OOP.
> And yet there are hardly any software written in Haskell or Ocaml that are widely used or have any notable positive impact on the modern digital world,

It's used in supply chain management at target.

IIRC at Starbucks too.

Oh, and ever use Facebook chat? Haskell is running over your messages to filter out spam.