Jane Street wasn't all that prestigious when they started using OCaml. The way they put it is "it was easier to find great programmers in the empty set of people who know OCaml than in the huge set of other programmers" (roughly). So, on the contrary, I think it might help boring cludgy company find quality talent.

I think there is a fallacy being repeated in this thread, namely that the choice is between mainstream and weird, or between old-and-tested and new-and-shiny. No, that's not the choice. The choice is between tools and abstractions that are helpful and productive, and those that aren't. Some of the helpful and productive things are old, some are new, some are mainstream, some are niche.

I don't fully understand how someone wants to spend their career in programming and not actively seek out what is helpful and productive, rather than what currently gets the most questions on Stack Overflow or has a big pool of people who put it on their CV. It's not like all languages are equally good. It's a wasteful approach.

There's another aspect, which myself and a few others in this thread have mentioned - hireability. Both from the company's and employee's perspective.

I'm pretty sure Jane Street would have paid well even when they were an obscure name.

Will boring cludgy Fortune500 company or noname startup pay well for someone to come use an exotic tech stack that is used very rarely at any other companies? Likely not.

Likewise, would an engineer well versed in some exotic language, and can land offers at top companies, come work for a boring cludgy Fortune500 company that is only willing to pay a fraction of what they can get elsewhere?

Maybe if you've already made your fortune elsewhere and well on the road to FIRE, and are really just looking for interesting work regardless of pay.

So are you saying that Jane Street more or less bribed people who didn't really care for OCaml to come work in a weird language, by offering a good salary? I find that far-fetched, and there are many other examples of companies attractive highly-competent people because they choose -- no, not exotic, weird, or niche tech, but good tech, that aid people thinking more clearly and abstracting better.

As in everything else, there is a trade-off involved here of course. And what is truly good and helpful is by no means obvious, and might take time to assess.

"Bribed" is a crude way to describe it, but in a manner of speaking, yes?

I think you might be a tad idealistic, and you might think I'm being a tad cynical. Maybe the truth is in the middle somewhere.

But throwing enough money at someone can talk. And not throwing enough money at someone can also talk. Short of being asked to do something unethical or illegal, what's wrong with that?

Can you honestly say all of the talented top engineers out there working for top paying companies are doing it for the pursuit of technological perfection, and aren't doing it at least partially for the good money?

I would say the same thing about doctors - people all love to say you should not get into medicine for money, but can we honestly say money isn't at least a factor in whether someone decides to pursue a MD?

Ron Minsky of Jane Street has explicitly said, many times, that their choice of OCaml attracted great developers who wanted to work with it.

> I think you might be a tad idealistic

Agreed :)

"Helpful and productive" is highly context dependent. There are many tasks for which Ocaml is great at, and also many tasks for which there are much better choices available.

I worked on a team using Haskell at Target for a few years and we had a massively easier time hiring compared to the other data science/ML teams. I figure it came down to two things:

1. People are actively interested in using Haskell and working with others interested in Haskell/PL/FP/etc. More people want to do Haskell than there are Haskell jobs and Haskell openings get massive word-of-mouth advertising.

2. It's a way to show that we're willing to do something different and interesting. Everybody says they are, but how do you actually demonstrate it? I remember one of the first great hires we had was an OR professor who didn't even know about Haskell—but joined in part because what we were doing was different and innovative.

If I ever end up starting my own company, I'm going to use Haskell because it's so much easier to hire for it—completely opposite to the superficial "common knowledge" that guides executive decisions at large companies.