Ocaml issue never was the syntax which is completely fine. The current syntax is actually a lot nicer that what Facebook proposed. Ocaml issue is not being a USA-born project nor having a significant marketing push in English.
Plus, Ocaml always was too far ahead of its time (including now with its effect system). First, you have the functional approach which was already very unfamiliar for most. Then, you have to add module level programming on top which is still very unfamiliar to most. Just look at this comment page and people thinking Ocaml is not fun to use or less interesting than Haskell, it's trully sad.
Multicore has added the extremely promising effect system but that's once again a step too far for most current developers.
In a lof of way, Ocaml is to programming language what the Pixies are to rock music. Everyone who felt deeply in love with it went on to write a language of their own. Some got really successful.
I would love to replace my Go code with OCaml. It was always kind of on the verge though. On one hand, once you use a proper type system, you cannot look at Go. On the other, Go's multicore is just so much better than Async/Lwt. In terms of programming, in terms of debuggability, surely in terms of performance too. Having proper multithreading in 5.0 suddenly makes OCaml strictly superior in my (rather biased) opinion.
Tons of languages started outside the US. Python and Ruby being notable.
Really, OCaml’s syntax is beautiful, unless you’re one of those people who loves to show off how adept they are at typing matching braces, parentheses, commas, and semicolons. Writing a little lambda in C++ is an impressive display of manual dexterity… [&](…,…){… return …; }; Who would rather write that than let f x y = … in?
The only way I’d improve OCaml syntax would be to add something like python style list comprehension.
I love Ocaml (and Haskell-esque) syntax, but I must admit it can be detrimental to getting adopted.
I think another issue was bad tooling for a long time. Now with Dune it's great though, with very fast compile speeds.
Hopefully OCaml slowly gets the recognition it deserves, because it really is a great language.
There's nothing comparable to ocaml's module system that I know of in any other mature language so no one really arrives in ocaml with well developed intuition for what sorts of things are possible and worth doing with it. But once you've put the time in it's usually the correct answer to "how to do I do <haskell type system thing> in ocaml."
I'm not a type systems expert though and it's likely there are some novel & unique situations where it's the best or only solution. Just maybe not as much as people assume from outside. Anyway I think there is a proposal for it so it'll probably work its way in eventually.
Python is a counter argument here.
The first version was announced in English on Usenet. Van Rossum moved to the USA quite quickly to work on Python from CNRI in 1995. Then, it got funding from DARPA in 1999 with this as part of its pitch: "Create a code that is easy to understand and looks as easy as the English language."
Ocaml meanwhile is an INRIA child made by a French team to develop another INRIA child made by another French team. I think in Europe, that's approximately as US hostile as you can be.
Actually, Ocaml has only become somewhat popular since it's pushed a bit from the UK which I find amusing.
It just shows the mindset of its devs was a little behind the realities of the industry, or they simply didn't care about concurrency.
In comparison, I like how Python always tries to be on top of things by exploring new PEPs.
OCaml cared about concurrency (e.g. Lwt, Async are old libraries that provide concurrency -- they didn't need multicore Ocaml). OCaml didn't care so much about true _parallelism_ in threads until recently. Parallelism was to be obtained via processes and not threads in pre OCaml 5.0. True parallelism in threads is available in OCaml >= 5.0
Python is actually trying to go multicore too ! OCaml however beat it to the punch. The strengths of Python are elsewhere though, a topic for another day.
This is debating the relative finishing places of the two runners finishing last in the marathon after most of the other runners have already gone home and had their dinner.
I suspect a larger or at least comparable limitation was essentially pretending windows didn't exist for uh like thirty years. If you knew what you were doing you could cross compile for it but it was not easy. Getting a dev environment running on windows was basically impossible until like five years ago.
The syntax idk I don't have strong feelings about it. I initially recoiled like everyone else of course, but to me style and naming conventions are almost as important and on that front ocaml's are also among the worst in the world lol. Once you get used to it it's kind of endearing how fucked up it is.
I’m a bit lost because Ocaml has a Pascal-like syntax (I find it nice but I generally dislike B syntax and am amongst the rare bread of developer who didn’t start with a language using it) and an extremely nice naming convention. Ocaml strongly discourages overloading, weird operators and shortly named variables unless they are local and used for a short time or an idiom like the default type of a module being named t. Everything has a long name in a module with a long name. It’s extremely nice.
OCaml's syntax is not particularly Pascal-like. It'd be very hard for someone to mistake Pascal code for OCaml or vice versa.
