> Why isn't it more popular if it's so good? Because popularity and merit are not the same thing.
Yes! To add to that, the question itself is wrong. We should be asking, how is OCaml able to be so good without being popular? People get the whole thing backward.
The popular languages are typically popular first, then get good later as a result of that popularity. They have to work, they have to be good, they're too big to fail.
This is what happened with Java. It was marketed like crazy at first and only later got refined in terms of tooling and the JVM itself. The R programming language was a mess for data wrangling, but once it was popular, people built things like the tidyverse or the data.table library. The Python ecosystem was disaster with all different testing packages, build tools, and ways to create and manage virtual environments, until the relatively recent arrival of uv, more than three decades after the creation of Python itself. And then there's javascript that's had more money, blood, sweat, and tears poured into it to be improved in one way or another because that's what practically anything running in a browser is using.
Yes! To add to that, the question itself is wrong. We should be asking, how is OCaml able to be so good without being popular? People get the whole thing backward.
The popular languages are typically popular first, then get good later as a result of that popularity. They have to work, they have to be good, they're too big to fail.
This is what happened with Java. It was marketed like crazy at first and only later got refined in terms of tooling and the JVM itself. The R programming language was a mess for data wrangling, but once it was popular, people built things like the tidyverse or the data.table library. The Python ecosystem was disaster with all different testing packages, build tools, and ways to create and manage virtual environments, until the relatively recent arrival of uv, more than three decades after the creation of Python itself. And then there's javascript that's had more money, blood, sweat, and tears poured into it to be improved in one way or another because that's what practically anything running in a browser is using.