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We have uncovered an interesting development since publishing our previous article about Martin Odersky's claim that Scala is "foremost an industrial language". Apparently, Martin Odersky stated at Scala Days 2010 that he intends to create a startup offering commercial Scala support. He also mentioned it in a comment here . Needless to say, this would be a huge step forwards for Scala! As an interesting aside, the Scala in the Enterprise web page lists some industrial users of Scala including Électricité de France Trading, Twitter, Xebia, Xerox, FourSquare, Sony, Siemans, GridGain, AppJet, Reaktor, Nature, Managed Gaming Solutions, Tiental, Sygneca, AD Holdings, SAIC, Mimesis Republic and WattzOn.

Very interesting video interview here with Rich Hickey of Clojure and Joe Pamer of F# side-by-side. When the interviewer asks Rich Hickey what he thinks of F#, he says "I think F# is very cool" and then explains why. Rich Hickey is, of course, a visionary among programming language developers having single-handedly built a self-sustaining business around his own Clojure language. Remarkably, there are already more Clojure jobs than OCaml jobs according to IT Jobs Watch and there are now twice as many Google searches for Clojure as there are for OCaml:

In a recent interview about Scala and Clojure, Martin Odersky of Scala gave some interesting answers including the following: Q: Rich Hickey is as well-read in the academic papers as anyone, but it’s Scala that has gained the perception as an “academic language”. Why do you think that has happened? A: I think it’s mostly people who want to put Scala down making that comment. They take my EPFL affiliation and the papers we publish as an excuse to attach that label to the language. What’s funny is that often senior industrial Scala programmers get also accused as being academic. All this is rather ironical because Scala is foremost an industrial language with many well known companies using it. By contrast it’s much less taught at universities than Haskell or Lisp, let alone Java! This raises the obvious question: in what sense is Scala "foremost an industrial language"? As we understand it, Scala is developed by an academic team led by professor Odersky at an academic insti...

Paolo from Italy pointed out that the number of blog posts on OCaml has continued to increase in recent years (6,420, 10,500 and 12,100 in 2007/8/9 according to Google blog search) and referred to the success of this year's OCaml meeting with 80 delegates in France. These are certainly encouraging results but it may be worth bringing more data to the table. Firstly, Google Trends can be used to graph the proportion of Google searches for different search terms over time. The following graph shows the trends for the keywords OCaml and F# since 2004: As you can see, the proportion of searches for OCaml (blue) is in steady decline whereas the proportion of searches for F# (red) is on the increase and the two crossed over in 2007. In fact, we have found that Google Trends correlates very strongly with our revenue. Secondly, we can examine statistics about the job market. The following bar chart illustrates the change in UK jobs from 2008 to 2010 for four functional programming langu...

One of the concerns expressed by some of the remaining OCaml users, such as Yaron Minsky of Jane St Capital, is the relative performance of F# in the context of purely functional data structures. Specifically, language implementations like OCaml are heavily optimized for this use case due to their legacy and on-going use for applications such as theorem proving, which benefit greatly from the efficient handling of purely functional data structures. Historically, most users of imperative languages such as Java and C# have not required this kind of performance and, consequently, their implementations have not been optimized for this style of programming. However, the recently released .NET 4 includes a new garbage collector and we have found that it provides substantial performance improvements in the context of purely functional data structures which is of particular benefit to F# developers. We recently examined the performance of four different purely functional heap implementati...

Haskell has a history of making easy problems difficult. Perhaps the most infamous example was the Sieve of Eratosthenes, which is easily implemented in any imperative language but was so difficult to write in Haskell that almost all of the solutions that had been taught in universities and used in research for the preceding 18 years had been wrong until Melissa O'Neill published a seminal paper The Genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes that gave a beautiful description of what they had been doing wrong and how it should be corrected. Melissa's solution was to use a priority queue to implement a rolling wheel of numbers. The correct solution turned out to be 10× longer than a much simpler F# solution and a whopping 100× longer than the original bastardized algorithm in Haskell. Today, quicksort is the new Sieve of Eratosthenes. Again, the academics have addressed Haskell's failure by bastardizing the algorithm , trading orders of magnitude in performance for something that Haskel...

After over 3 years, The OCaml Journal is finally closing down. New subscriptions offer access to the 75 existing articles and only a few more articles will be published, to honour outstanding subscriptions. This marks Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. officially pulling out of the OCaml market as our remaining OCaml products (such as the OCaml for Scientists book) require no on-going maintenance. This change has, of course, come about due to a dramatic fall in our revenue from OCaml products since 2007. This is partly because we decided in 2007 to jump ship to Microsoft's new F# programming language . However, the same trend can be seen in the rate of posts to the OCaml mailing lists, which has fallen 60% since 2007 and has now reached its lowest level for a decade: We blame the inability of OCaml's garbage collector to allow threads to run in parallel as the primary reason for this mass exodus. OCaml was an awesome tool in the late 1990s and, by 2004, many people were finding t...