Comment by greenarc
17 hours ago
Oh, hey Berké,
The GHGSat constellation's payload software is still mostly OCaml, although a limited amount of newer from scratch components are indeed in Rust. It's been working well and on 16 satellites now - but as you said the main challenge has been training developers to Ocaml and I doubt they would write new code in it now.
> the main challenge has been training developers to Ocaml and I doubt they would write new code in it now
Why do I never hear about these kinds of opportunities? I have done some Ocaml, quite a bit of embedded systems, and these days I have to waste the years doing web development.
Where do I have to call to be considered for doing OCaml embedded systems?
Right, I always find these kinds of statements about "we can't find talent in <'weird' language X>" a bit confusing because I personally know all kinds of people always desperate to find work in neat-lang be it Haskell, OCaml, whatever... But the opportunities never seem to be there.
And it was only 3-4 years ago (maybe less) that Rust was considered by hiring managers to be in that category, too. Ask me how I know.
I'm going to assume it really means that they can't find people who satisfy some other constraint (location, pay band, "required" degree, experience on some other system or in some industry, etc) and OCaml or whatever.
In any case, LLMs blunt this. Hell, please stop me from opening a tab and starting a new OCaml project right now.
Because in general, when they get the candidates that could fit the position, they get grilled in meaningless letcode interviews, or classical stuff like how many golf balls fit into a plane.
The pool is already small, and gets reduced even further.
Probably because the requirement is not knowing ocaml but knowing how to do X, preferably in ocaml.
If it ain't broke why fix it?