OCaml for the Masses (2011)
I for one can't wait for Typed FP to become mainstream as soon as possible. I think the prevalence of scripting languages in large systems today is a quirk of history.In early 2000s, as the web was growing to be an application delivery platform, the only practical statically typed language was Java. It didn't have generics or lambdas at the time, and was infested with the sprawl of J2EE. Choosing Ruby/Python over Java was at the time an act of rebellion and a show of technical superiority. To quote pg: "if they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers."The static type system in Java is object-oriented: the only way to create a type is to create a class. I believe it was limited in abstraction power and everyone attributed it to the rigidity of static types. Java has come a long way since, but the sense that dynamic typing is superior to static types lingers.But OCaml's static types are a completely different kind of type. There is a kind of "procedural" static typing in Go, C, and to some extent C++ where primitives are typed and you can construct structs and unions without much ceremony. Then there is object-oriented static typing in Java and C#, which traces its origin back to Simula through C++ where types and classes are the same. Then you have functional static types where types are just and only about data. Almost all Typed FP languages use a form of Hindley-Milner inference, support algebraic data types and pattern matching, have generics (they were invented by Milner for ML in 1973), and allows for code organization and encapsulation through modules and opaque types.Algebraic data types alone is a tool for thought like no other. You'll start reifying concepts that would've otherwise gone implicit in your codebase thanks to ADT. The languages are solid, ecosystems are vibrant but small and that can only be fixed with more people. Come on in, the water is fine!