Why does it seem like I'm hearing about OCaml all the time now? It could just be frequency bias but it wasn't that long ago that I'd never heard of it and now it seems to be getting a lot of attention online.
I think we're cycling back towards a general preference for statically typed languages, for one thing. Additionally, a number of traditionally functional language characteristics have been finding more widespread adoption among popular languages. Putting these together, OCaml is on a short list of languages that are functional and statically typed and, uh, perhaps "intuitive" is the word I want — Haskell is not very intuitive for many people due to its lazy evaluation scheme.
In my opinion, OCaml would see even more widespread use if the documentation were improved. I find it a chore to figure out how to use OCaml well. I also would like to use third-party libraries like Jane Street's Base because they've put a lot of work into providing even more functionality in their standard library, but their documentation is absolutely atrocious (where it exists at all).
OCaml is a mature language but does not have a very supportive ecosystem. I'm hoping the renewed interest will prompt changes there.
> Why does it seem like I'm hearing about OCaml all the time now?
I felt that way about a dozen years ago. These things have cycles, apparently. But they also recently released multi-core OCaml in OCaml 5 which opens some doors for OCaml that were previously not open.
the ocaml ecosystem has been going through something of a renaissance over the last few years (i believe because the build and package management tooling hit some sort of inflection point with dune and opam respectively), so there's been a lot of increased interest in it. it was (imo, of course) always a very pleasant language to use, and produced small and fast executables; the tooling was what was really holding it back.
To some degree a lot of people are now finding OCaml via dev YouTube influencers who highlight OCaml without actually having used it. There's a lot of enthusiasm, kind of like how lots of people were loving and super excited about Rust without ever using it even for toy programs.
Edit:
I have used OCaml in production and currently I don't see a point to doing it again for the vast majority of problems. From a holistic language + runtime point of view OCaml occupies a space where it's not useful enough from a runtime perspective to replace any of the more convenient languages that exist and not low-level enough to fill the spot of any of the good alternatives in that space. Modularity-wise functors are nice but ultimately plenty of alternatives exist even it the lower-level languages.
With all that said, people should probably use the hell out of it if they're excited. It's a bit tiring seeing the constant stream of misinformation regarding alternatives to OCaml, though. There are good reasons it's losing out in industrial use to even languages like Haskell.
In my opinion, OCaml would see even more widespread use if the documentation were improved. I find it a chore to figure out how to use OCaml well. I also would like to use third-party libraries like Jane Street's Base because they've put a lot of work into providing even more functionality in their standard library, but their documentation is absolutely atrocious (where it exists at all).
OCaml is a mature language but does not have a very supportive ecosystem. I'm hoping the renewed interest will prompt changes there.