> I feel if OCaml had got its act together around about 2010 with multicore and a few other annoyances[1]

OCaml had its act together. It was significantly nicer than Python when I used it professionally in 2010. Just look at what JaneStreet achieved with it.

The main impediment to OCaml was always that it was not American nor mainly developed from the US.

People like to believe there is some technical merit to language popularity but the reality it’s all fashion based. Rust is popular because they did a ton of outreach. They used to pay someone full time to mostly toot their horn.

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jvican 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Hear, hear. This theory also explains why other languages such as Scala were never really mainstream despite allowing Java- and Kotlin- style programming and having a much broader follower base in Europe. Lack of outreach, concerted marketing, and advocacy from American companies that have always dominated the narrative.

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nothrabannosir 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Python, PHP, Ruby: all not American though, right? Do you mean those only got hockey stick growth when they happened to get picked up by the USA ? But then couldn’t the same have happened for ocaml? And if so: why didn’t it, as it supposedly did for the others

Not to mention Linux I guess

	▲	StopDisinfo910 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Von Rossum moved to the US and Python actually got US government funding pretty early. Lerdorf did PHP in Canada so America. Ruby is kind of the exception being Japanese but it’s pretty niche - nearly as much as Ocaml - and is mostly popular for Rails which was started from Denmark but by someone working for, you guessed it, a US company. Torvald announced Linux on a US usenet list and moved to California soon after. Ocaml difference is that the core development is done by INRIA, a French public institution and the people in charge had zero interest in moving to the US or chasing the US market. It’s funny because Ocaml became a bit more popular when people from the UK (Cambridge, JaneStreet) started doing more outreach.