It doesn't get said very much but the ML ecosystem is full, complete, and very much production quality. It is a shame that there are not many projects or companies that make use of all that it has to offer.
And I have a similar feeling of sadness that Racket (or one of the other Scheme variants) isn't used more.
I've wondered whether one of the barriers is still that students' only exposure to these is usually using it in school for some contrived homework assignments, and dismissing the tools for "real work" before they've tried applying them. (And at least some schools are emphasizing having students ready for internship/interview with popular languages now, so innovative languages can get even less attention.)
I'm always surprised that F# didn't take off. It's a great language and in addition to the strenghts of ML you have the .net ecosystem and Microsoft behind it.
It took awhile before it seemed that Microsoft was truly behind it. I tried looking into it when version 2.0 was released and it was a pain in the ass trying to get it to work with Visual Studio 2010 Express. I was not a professional programmer at that time so I didn't have access to Visual Studio Pro. That experience turned me off to the language and I never really went back to look at it.
There’s some hedge funds using F#. C# has historically been popular in certain parts of finance any many of those shops are now exclusively using F# for new code.
Personally, F# is nice and all, but the lack of higher kinded types rubs me the wrong way.
I really want to use Ocaml for web application back-ends, but last time I checked the ecosystem around that in Ocaml is less than extensive compared to languages like Python, JS, java, etc. It really is a shame. I need to set aside some time to really dive deep into Ocaml and make a simple micro framework or something.
From my small amount of exposure, I can say that I love Ocaml's expressiveness and flexibility.
There are some scattered pieces in the ecosystem for routing, sessions etc but i agree that compared to Python, JS, etc the ecosystem might not look as cohesive or expansive for web applications. So there should definitely be room to have new solutions in this space
Did you check out F#? I’ve never personally used it, but I know it takes advantage of the .NET ecosystem (and with .NET Core, is no longer tied solely to windows).
One little thing which would improve the ecosystem is public ci support... as simply as with other languages. Yes, eg travis or circle can do OCaml but with considerably more effort than other languages where for personal projects I often have a one liner.
I have not been using OCaml, but I have been using Reason / Bucklescript on Windows extensively. Other than some expectation that GNU tools like cp are available on the path, everything has worked beautifully.
