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Hey @UnixJunkie, this looks great! I think there’s a paragraph from the “Conclusion” section that could be made into a fine testimonial:
To us, OCaml has been proven quite productive for
software prototyping in Chemoinformatics and Struc-
tural Bioinformatics method development. The software
demonstrated here were used intensively and timely dur-
ing scientific validation campaigns, on many molecules
and protein targets. We have never regretted our choice
of OCaml and still use it today.
Francois Berenger , Kam Y. J. Zhang and Yoshihiro Yamanishi - in “Chemoinformatics and structural bioinformatics in OCaml” (Journal of Cheminformatics volume 11, Article number: 10 (2019)).
This is quite a mouthful of a citation, but of course you can cite the article.
I definitely recommend OCaml for scientific (or even system / backend) software prototyping.
The performance of the final software in production is very good and it will almost
never crash on you (compared to Python programs…).
Another aspect where OCaml shines in science/academia is the long term backwards compatibility and clear & static build processes.
I’ve had feedback from people successfully running code I had not touched in more than a decade.
On the other hand I have witnessed bioinformatics postdocs wasting months of their lives just trying to run python/perl/c++ artifacts that came with papers that were barely a couple of years old.