Learn OCaml

If I learned OCaml, what type of prospects would I have?

Fairly seasoned generalist, mostly writing Go these days. Lots of plumbing with LLMs etc.

Would love to learn something new but am driven by a goal in mind (ie OCaml exposes me to "X industry")

Is that a thing?

Learning OCaml exposes you to the sadomasochist industry, that's about it.

Probably the biggest sectors where functional programming is used are finance and crypto (which is arguably finance). Some companies use OCaml itself, other companies might use other languages like Haskell where OCaml knowledge would be valuable.

You can see a list on the OCaml website of companies using it, or read some success stories (https://ocaml.org/industrial-users).

The trading firm Jane Street is the big OCaml shop, they have a great podcast about all their tech. Each episode is someone from a team talking about the tool they've built, and their whole ecosystem is pretty much bespoke OCaml tooling.

- https://signalsandthreads.com/

(It's one of three programming podcasts I consistently listen to these days, the others being On The Metal and Developer Voices.)

OCaml is like nim, not many ppl knows about, but it is one those tech once over the learning curve it just gives developer an extra edge.

It is a very good alternative to memory safe language such as Rust and Swift. It is just NOT backed by big corporations. Which some might see it as a disadvantage, IMHO it is an advantage. Look at Perl, Linux, Hono all initially made by one guy.

With out a big group, golden handcuffs and corporate politics, things might actually gets done.

Lots of cool stuff does seep out of Jane Street, though. See for example https://oxcaml.org/ as probably the most recent very public example

> If I learned OCaml, what type of prospects would I have?

At one point, I believe KDE[0] had OCaml integrations and/or community support.

0 - https://kde.org/

name checks out: iLoveOCaml

Jane Street would be one of the big names that also sponsors a bunch of events / resources.

Bespoke tooling makes me think that the standard tooling is lacking. How does it compare to Rust's tooling?

lol

imagine everything that's good about Rust tooling but significantly less good or non-existent instead

(the VS Code plugin for OCaml is actually decent though)

The VS Code plugin is, like, 90% of the developer experience of most devs. The fact that it's rock-solid in OCaml should automatically bump us up to at least a B grade. Meanwhile the dune build system is powerful and flexible, and compile times are actually blazing fast, unlike Rust's famous slow builds. So yeah, there are pros and cons on each side, I wouldn't say it's a clear win.

The article isn’t a very technical one. I’d wager when they say tooling they mean any in house program they use as a tool, as opposed to what we as programmers would think of, like compilers, dev tools etc.

Ocaml has a pretty robust ecosystem of good dev tools and build tools.

Nowadays, I don't think Linux is 100%, community-driven only software, considering it also has backup from big corps like Intel, IBM, Oracle, etc etc.

In the similar way, most programming language implementations used in industry (Java, C#, Go etc) also have big corps backup.

My main job is mobile app development, and OCaml definitely lacks significant menpower on this side, so if I were going to use it for my job... perhaps backend stuff? Or what?

If you're talking about me (GP), I meant that Jane Street has built an entire ecosystem around OCaml, from their customer-facing and backend software to traditional OCaml tooling (like build systems). That being said, all I know is from the podcast I linked. I haven't touched OCaml (yet?) myself.

See https://ocaml.org/industrial-users

Current industry uses are largely in specialist areas including compiler engineering, static analyses, formal verification systems, and systems programming in critical domains.