Not built in does not mean not possible or available...
In addition, there are many other companies that use functional languages and my (subjective) experience had been that such orgs are able to achieve far more with smaller teams (cf Whatsapp and Erlang). Facebook and Bloomberg are also users. I find it somewhat bizarre that people are making an issue of the business case for using OCaml in a startup. How many people did that before using Python/Ruby/etc back in the day?
Edit: and here's a clicky link to PG's essay http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
It seems true that technology can only go mainstream if there are companies taking the risk to use it in production.
To CEO of Esper. Interesting. How many decades of experience do you have? How many projects you've successfully shipped? How many of these there using this approach of using non-mainstream languages?
Nothing forces you to read the posts you don't like.
> Well, I'll chirp on the opposite side of discusion. The syntax is completely <->:%^&#$^ $% %^&*% up. Unreadable. Yes, it maybe somewhat pleasant to write code in such syntax, but readability sucks.
Readability is mostly a matter of experience.
> Which means that there are uncountably many ways to screw up the design
And many ways to make it fit a given problem. It's again a matter of experience.
> And each OCaml primadonna developer thinks that his way is the right way. And the rest can't read his code. Fuck that.
Glad you give your opinion. Apparently you have an axe to grind against the OCaml community though. You could probably replace OCaml with any language with a lot of expressiveness, and still be correct - assuming there are "primadonna"s in the OCaml community and that "any other". Or do you mean that this happen only with OCaml?
"It is totaly bogus claim." A single example of Perl, Brainfuck or Ocaml can prove that you are wrong. "The only people that can't read their own Perl after 6 months are the people that don't really know Perl." "Replace "perl" with "APL" or "BrainFuck" (or any language with baroque syntax) and the above sentence is as (in)valid."
1) It's practical - for our team, we had developed in it before and had deployed a large system in it - we could get to where we wanted quickly.
2) we think it's a competitive advantage (see OP and PG's Beating the Averages essay) - additionally, since we deal with large amounts of data, OCaml was particularly helpful in that regard too
3) OCaml is a good filter - the thing that matters more to us is a person's elasticity of learning - their ability to learn new things. We use the right tool for the right job, so we also use javascript, java, objective-C, etc. OCaml is a pretty good filter and test for elasticity of learning.
Lastly, not a primary reason, but an advantage - languages get popular because the companies that use them are popular (i.e. gain market traction and can pay developers). That doesn't mean it's the most efficient way to get things done. We'd like to be part of the group that helps make the industry more efficient.