[DonaldPShimoda]

You think they are platinum-level sponsors at multiple conferences every year, sponsors of PLMW multiple times a year, sponsors for carbon-neutrality at ICFP each year, and continue investing in hiring PhDs and improving the OCaml ecosystem because... the... cost of switching away from OCaml is too great?

I don't think that tracks. They like OCaml, and they are pretty adamant that it is a good tool for the job. Maybe you disagree, but you should not project your opinions on them.

[skrebbel]

I bet it is also a great way for them to hire and retain great engineers, including the kind that isn't just in it for the money.

[DonaldPShimoda]

Speaking only of what I see (I'm a PhD student in the field of programming languages), quite a few people seek internships and full-time employment with JS specifically because of the tech stack and the kind of problems they (JS) tend to like throwing themselves at. They do some seriously cool stuff, and they've published a lot of great research!

[tedunangst]

I don't think that's the situation, but if you are irreversibly committed to a technology, you have an interest in seeing that tech continue to advance. Being stuck on a dead tech is even worse.

[DonaldPShimoda]

> I don't think that's the situation

I'm not sure what you mean by this. What is the situation?

> Being stuck on a dead tech is even worse.

Why do you think OCaml is a "dead tech"? Can you justify that? Or is it just based on the notion that if most people don't use it, it must be a bad tool?

[lawl]

I dont think he's saying it's dead tech. He's saying their incentive to invest into ocaml is to make sure it doesn't become dead tech.

[nojito]

Pretty much yes.

Cost is more than just monetary. There are significant indirect costs as well.

[DonaldPShimoda]

> There are significant indirect costs as well.

Can you elaborate on these costs? Do you have knowledge of JS's internal needs and resources to suggest a better alternative?

They are not just hapless consumers of a dead language; they actively maintain it and invest in it because it works well for them. The language itself gives them the kind of guarantees they want in their work, and their work on the language and surrounding tooling (among other things) helps them to acquire high-skill talent. I don't know how you can claim that they would transition to another language if they could without having some pretty firm data to back that claim up. Otherwise, I think you're just projecting your own feelings about OCaml onto them.

[nojito]

You seem eerily passionate about JS all over this thread.

Nowhere did I mention that Ocaml was a dead language or a dying language. I simply stated that there are insurmountable switching costs which incentivizes them to contribute to the larger Ocaml community.

[b20000]

I think they are mostly here to hire people. Not to educate.

[DonaldPShimoda]

If by "here" you mean "at academic conferences", then I'd ask you why they bother to actually do primary research and publish it if they have no interest in sharing knowledge.

If all they wanted was to hire people, they... would. You don't have to sponsor a conference to attend or hire from that conference. And you especially also don't need to sponsor additional workshops, or carbon neutrality initiatives, or anything else.

It's genuinely silly to suggest that they spend all this money on things just to hire people. There are so many more effective uses of their money if that is the only goal.

[b20000]

because they are hoping to run into interesting people to hire. why would they share knowledge otherwise? if they are interested in doing that, why not share all the details of their tech stack and what they are doing exactly in the market? it's very hard to hire, especially with FAANGs who compete with them for talent.

[DonaldPShimoda]

> why would they share knowledge otherwise?

Because they believe in the value of science?

They don't need to publish to compete with top-tier public companies. I don't know of any other trading firm that contributes to open-source development, or to a language infrastructure, or to academic advancement in the way and to the extent that Jane Street do. Most companies keep everything proprietary and highly secret.

But JS chooses to publish. And it's not like that's an easy task that you can just do for fun on a whim; it takes a long time to put together a good paper. They also regularly collaborate with people in academia on long-term projects and evaluations.

I understand the perspective you're suggesting, but I genuinely believe it is wrong, and I also believe that you do not have any evidence to back it up. I think their public contributions speak for themselves, but I've also met some of their more academically inclined engineers (including their CTO), and they come from an academic background and seem to genuinely believe in academic publishing as a goal in itself. It's not totally crazy that there exists one such company out there. (There are actually a couple, but not terribly many, and the others are not relevant in the present discussion.)