> Is OCaml an especially comfortable environment to work in?
It is one of these small languages that are not completely niche: it is taught and used, you'll be able to do plenty of things, but there is not the community and resources you find in the big ones or even the mid-sized ones
The thing that I really like about it is that the compiler is very, very fast. Especially when you're in the edit-compile-rerun cycle and doing incremental compiles. This gives people a huge productivity boost and keeps them in flow state much more easily.
The only program written in OCaml that I think I've used is WeiDU mod installer for Infinity Engine games.
Took a quick look under the bonnet too. Suffice to say, my only thought has been that should the author had chosen a sane language like say Perl (which seems to be ideally suited to what WeiDu does), the software could have been improved by many, many people.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 22.2 ms ] threadOne of my favorite programs, an ncurses-based RPN calculator called Orpie, is written in OCaml, but I've never messed around with it.
It is one of these small languages that are not completely niche: it is taught and used, you'll be able to do plenty of things, but there is not the community and resources you find in the big ones or even the mid-sized ones