sweeneyrod

I agree that dune is worse in many important ways than the build systems of languages like Rust and Go (where they were developed at the same time as the language, rather than 20 years later). But dune config files aren't lisp. They're s-expressions, which have the same syntax as lisp but are just static data like json/yaml/toml (and once you get used to them, I think most people prefer them to those).

I believe Ruby and OCaml have both anonymous positional arguments and keyword arguments with punning (i.e. `f ~arg` expands to `f ~arg:arg` in OCaml).

You can get those cool features in languages such as OCaml/F#/Scala/Haskell, and then you don't have to worry about managing memory because you have a GC.

It is quite possible that an Erlang dev billing 3x more than a PHP dev will be more than 3x as productive.

Unit tests and "type systems" have very little in common with Kubernetes and GraphQL.

It's interesting that they have a much higher valuation (and from some cursory research, moderately more users) than Depop, despite (AFAIK) being completely obscure in the US/UK.

There are various universities that teach Haskell or similar languages in first year.

Yes, I think everyone would agree that OCaml has gone from competing with the predominant high-level language of 1996 (C) to the predominant languages of today (definitely not C).

Another factor is that creating a language (Rust, Go etc.) from scratch lets you have nice unified tooling to an extent that is probably just not possible with languages with baggage. So I doubt OCaml will ever manage to be quite as seamless as those, but IMO it's already gone from significantly worse tooling than e.g. Python/Java to significantly better, and is still improving all the time!

Would you consider using a non-GC language that isn't Rust outside the various domains where C/C++ is the only realistic (non-Rust) choice?

I think you are definitely pointing at something that has been a weakness of OCaml for a long time (but as you say is happily changing). But I wouldn't characterise it as elitism; IME the OCaml community is very friendly.

Instead, I think it comes from the fact that when it was first developed in the 90s, it was viewed in the context of C (and this attitude has carried over somewhat to the modern day where it makes much less sense). For example, building non-trivial projects with just the compiler is very painful from most modern perspectives, but it's very similar to what you have to do for C.

I don't think memory safety bugs are the most widespread kind at all, unless you add the qualification "in languages with manual memory management".

As well as the Amodei siblings in charge, various other ex-OpenAI people are involved (Chris Olah, Amanda Askell, Jack Clark).