Does anyone here have any experience with Koka? I've been following the language from afar for a while but I have yet to read an account of what it's like to use it in practice.
I think that it is poised for rapid growth this year. I've been using it quite a bit, and once it gains a more comprehensive standard library, I think it will be much more useful in practice. Given the activity on GitHub, I would suggest checking back in a few months for a more out-of-the-box experience (it will still be a new language - but more ready to entertain serious projects). However, I would give it a try now if it looks interesting to you, install the VScode extension, look through some samples and leave some feedback on github.
As a side note, it has pretty great C interop, so you should be able to use C libraries or your own C code, for missing functionality. Documentation on this feature is unfortunately lacking right now though.
I've tried using it a bit. It works and it is fun to use, but there are quite a number of rough edges. I wouldn't use it in production yet, I don't think they are conservative there.
I would say that research language is an appropriate description currently. For example it has very little standard library. Though I would say that it is well positioned to take off in the next year with several important improvements coming soon.