| > OCaml's real pain point isn't the syntax - it's that you can't hire for it. if you're building a startup and you pick OCaml, you've just cut your hiring pool by 95%. that's way more painful than learning a different way to write functions. I hear this a lot about Scala and it's never been an issue in practice. A smaller pool of candidates makes hiring easier, I'd much rather screen 20 résumés than 400. The typical candidate, whether experienced or willing to learn, is also better on average. "We can't find qualified developers" usually tells more about the employer, in reality that means: - We aren't willing to pay market rates. - We don't invest in even the most basic on-the-job training. - Seniority distribution is junior heavy; we expect one senior developer per team who can mentor all the other ones. Or a combination of the above. I know two relatively small companies that use OCaml, they don't pay anywhere near Jane Street salaries, but they're willing to hire people who show interest in the language and invest a little in their training. This works. On my end I've hired several people coming almost purely from Python, after a few weeks they contribute to fairly advanced Scala codebases. |