My pleasure, Jordan - thanks for the great work you and your team do on ReasonML.
I agree that OCaml has some brilliant libraries for problems which are, in other languages, difficult or unpleasant to solve (parsing being one of them). Menhir is wonderful. However, that doesn't preclude gripes 3 & 4 from above. If a language seeks to be general-purpose, the existence of some truly great libraries doesn't redeem a need for dependable solutions to a multitude of problems.
I think OCaml can have a place in an organization's software stack today - but it will not gain the spotlight until its library offerings have the variety, robustness, and accessibility of other ecosystems. Would I write an internal parsing service using Menhir and expose over Protobuf? Absolutely. Would I write a heavier-duty application server that had to parse something, then talk to Postgres? Perhaps not - and that's a shame.
Love Reason React. I'm a huge static typing proponent where possible, and combining the semantics of OCaml with React is a great move.
Writing the occasional typed FFI wrapper into a Javascript library isn't the worst thing in the world. Most of my complaints for libraries center around server side OCaml/ReasonML development, which is where I have the most experience. (and that experience is admittedly limited)
I agree that OCaml has some brilliant libraries for problems which are, in other languages, difficult or unpleasant to solve (parsing being one of them). Menhir is wonderful. However, that doesn't preclude gripes 3 & 4 from above. If a language seeks to be general-purpose, the existence of some truly great libraries doesn't redeem a need for dependable solutions to a multitude of problems.
I think OCaml can have a place in an organization's software stack today - but it will not gain the spotlight until its library offerings have the variety, robustness, and accessibility of other ecosystems. Would I write an internal parsing service using Menhir and expose over Protobuf? Absolutely. Would I write a heavier-duty application server that had to parse something, then talk to Postgres? Perhaps not - and that's a shame.
Love Reason React. I'm a huge static typing proponent where possible, and combining the semantics of OCaml with React is a great move.
Writing the occasional typed FFI wrapper into a Javascript library isn't the worst thing in the world. Most of my complaints for libraries center around server side OCaml/ReasonML development, which is where I have the most experience. (and that experience is admittedly limited)