Jon Harrop wrote:

>The number of people searching for OCaml on Google has sky-rocketed since 
>Microsoft's announcement that they are productizing F#:
>
>http://www.google.com/trends?q=f%23%2Cocaml&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
>
>I think this is very good news for the OCaml language as it will now have a 
>mainstream cousin to cover Windows while OCaml covers Linux and Mac OS X. 
>Hooray! :-)
>
>  
>
Personally, I agree with you.  The competition to Ocaml is not F#, or 
SML, or Haskell, or Erlang, it's not learning a functional programming 
language *at all*.  Which is currently the most popular choice by 
programmers by far. 

It's weird, and I don't understand it, but there are a lot of people for 
whom Microsoft is a comfort zone- if Microsoft is doing it, it's worth 
while to learn (and safe to learn).  Leave Microsoft, and you're in the 
howling wilderness with the barbarians.  I agree that this makes no 
sense, but I know way to many of them for this to be coincidence.  So 
Microsoft putting it's seal of approval on a functional language, *any* 
functional language, is a big deal.   This means that a lot of people 
will be willing to look at F# who would never in a million years look at 
Ocaml.  And while the code does not cross over, the programming 
experience (by and large) does.  Someone who knows F# is going to find 
learning Ocaml a breeze.

Short of Microsoft adopting Ocaml themselves (which isn't going to 
happen), this is as good of news as I can imagine for Ocaml.  Don't let 
the perfect be the enemy of the good.

And I find it humorous the number of people on this list looking for the 
cloud associated with this silver lining.

Brian