u/TomosLeggett

The UK has had a rough couple of years and fixing the UK's many issues is a huge undertaking that certainly won't be easy.

We've now got:

• An aging population
• Wealth inequality (9th worst in the OECD)
• Regional inequality
• A birth rate of 1.4
• Asset rich, cash poor pensioners
• An over-capacitive NHS
• An unaffordable triple-lock state pension
• A migrant crisis
• A voting system that isn't particularly proportional
• A low voting turnout from younger people
• Stagnant wages since 2008 coupled with no real wage growth
• Underfunded councils
• A general litter problem
• Meal deal has gone up by 59p
• UK plummeting down the happiness index
• Exhausted, dirty, inconsistent and patchy street furniture
• Car-centric infrastructure that also sucks ass
• Mediocre public transport at best
• An economy almost entirely centred around London and the finance sector
• A regressive council tax system
• Declining high streets
• A hostile and powerful media landscape
• A restrictive and overbearing planning system
• A system that struggles to build basic infrastructure without going over budget
• The inability to actually supply new housing stock
• Low GDP per capita compared to general GDP.
• Skyrocketing cost of living
• Rent being ~40% of wages sometimes
• Low productivity

(I'm sure there's more)

These aren't issues unique to the UK and are multi-faceted. Fixing all of these issues is practically impossible unless you're a magician, demigod or the UK suddenly struck oil. What's far more likely is incremental reforms that'll take decades. We all know that.

However if you one day woke up as Prime Minister, leader of a party with a lot of seats and a loyal party, poised with doing SOMETHING to get this country back on track with a population that expects the quality of life to increase even just a little bit...what would you do?

What do you think would be your golden bill? What do you think is the one thing the UK Government struggles to do that you think would fix a big chunk of these problems?

OCaml is easily my favourite programming language, even if the community around it is fairly small.

It's not perfect, but it's one of the few languages I've used where everything just fits together. The type system, algebraic data types, and pattern matching all make structuring programs feel straightforward instead of awkward. You end up modelling things properly from the start, and that cuts out a lot of the runtime issues you'd normally expect.

Once you get used to that, it's hard to go back. Dealing with nulls or loosely defined data in other languages starts to feel a bit rough. OCaml pushes you to be explicit, and the end result is code you can actually trust. It feels like going from writing with a biro to writing with a fountain pen.

Unpopular opinion, but I actually like the ML-style syntax. It's different at first, but it's consistent, and after a while it just feels normal. Most of the resistance to it seems to come from people being used to C-style languages more than anything else. I get why it looks awkward, but I think inertia has more to do with that than people admit.

There are obvious trade-offs. If you're building something that leans heavily on existing libraries or needs to plug into a bigger ecosystem, languages like Go or JavaScript are just easier to justify. That's usually what I end up using for client-facing work.

Same with quick scripting. OCaml isn't something you just pick up and start throwing scripts together in, but I don't think that's really what it's for.

OCaml does show up in industry here and there. Jane Street is the well-known example, but overall it's still a niche option. I've had friends ask me to teach them, and while I'd like that, I usually point them toward Python instead. It's just more useful to them early on. Bigger ecosystem, more tutorials, more opportunities.

That said, none of that really changes how I feel about it. For my own projects, it's always the first thing I reach for. It's just a nice language to spend time in. The tooling does what it needs to do (most of the time), and writing OCaml still feels fresh in a way most languages don't anymore.

It'll probably stay niche for a while, and honestly, I wish that wasn't the case. I'd love to see a bigger ecosystem, more people using it, more things being built with it. It deserves that much.

But even as it is now, it's still the language I enjoy using the most. And that's enough to keep me coming back to it.