Re: [Caml-list] ReasonML concrete syntax

[Evgeny Khramtsov <xramtsov@gmail.com>]

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 20:34:20 -0500
Yawar Amin <yawar.amin@gmail.com> wrote:

> These
> are OCaml people who are trying very carefully to design a syntax that
> appeals to a massive number of people.

There is a very similar story: Erlang and Elixir. If somebody doesn't
know: Elixir runs in Erlang VM (BEAM) and has Ruby-like syntax (Erlang,
on its turn, has obscure for many Prolog-like syntax). No doubt, Elixir
became more popular than Erlang (at least, judging by Github stars),
but still not popular enough (below top20 in any language charts). I
think this is because it's still functional language and this distracts
many. Furthermore, such separation splitted the community into two
camps, writing the same tools/programs, but only in different languages.
What's worse, now all job offers contain Erlang/Elixir requirement
(which makes no sense to me, frankly).

TL;DR: I doubt those guys from Facebook can make Reason significantly
more popular than OCaml, no matter what syntax they choose: they also
need to change functional paradigm.