> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.