Sure (the mods will probably want to move it though).
A (not so) little history first: the first language I learned in university was Caml, and second was OCaml a year later. Every student hated them because at that time the trend was C, Java and C++ (and the way it was presented, I think most students took Ocaml as a beginner language), but after learning those I missed the ability to be able to match on elements of a struct, and be reminded by the compiler that matches were off if I ever added or removed elements, among other things.
After a few years coding in Lua/JS/C++ I started coding a web server in C#, and even though many things were great and I enjoyed it, I still was not happy with all the runtime errors we always get because of a bad case or missing letter, and all the time lost because of that. I vented with a coworker (who is a fan of haskell) and kind of joked that if only there existed a webserver in Ocaml I’m sure it would take care of that at compile time and everything would be a breeze. He told me it was worth a look so I searched, and stumbled upon Ocsigen. That webserver, like Ocaml, was a thing of beauty that only cave-dwelling researchers can create. I was so happy! You change the number of fields in a form and forget to update the function handling the post? You link to a page you didn’t implement? You do a typo? The compiler will yell! Great! That’s what I had been waiting for years! Oh, and the ocaml code you wrote to check the form inputs? It’s going to be transcoded into JS so you can have client validation for free (and if you deactivate JS it works the same, unlike phoenix liveview 
)! You want to navigate to another page? It will diff the pages and send you just that. You could code your client side in ocaml too and share code between client and server. Etc.
There were three problems however:
- the compiler doesn’t know how to yell constructively. It’s not as bad as in C++ were you can get pages of errors because you forgot a semicolon somewhere else, but not far. The errors I get when I try carving my way with Elixir make so much more sense, instantly: they were made to be read and understood (and are presented beautifully on the page to boot!). Not Ocaml errors… You get somewhat used to them after a while but be prepared to lose your hair.
- this fantastic project felt more like a proof of concept than anything else (and indeed it was). The project website was not nice, there were dead links everywhere in the doc (it’s impossible to have dead links with Ocsigen within the project, but they stupidly put their example code in other projects. What’s the point then?), and the docs themselves were poor and unhelpful. You had to infer many things in order to have a working skeleton of a website (again not in the docs), and the lack of an active community as well as personal problems made me lose interest after trying to make a few small websites 4 years ago.
- the JS generated by the project is huge. I have only one small website still up using Ocsigen, and the bare JS is almost 5MB. Mostly static site, not even forms. That was the last nail in the coffin for me, as I was pondering about the strengths of Elixir/Phoenix at that time as well.
In short, the main issue with Ocaml is not Ocaml itself. Great minds built it, but those people are no marketeers nor web people. They do not think they have to be, and I understand that, as their focus is on industrial projects.
