| First off, thanks for disagreeing constructively. I was hoping somebody would argue with sources that Haskell has gotten better for practical use. It's a really cool language. You've convinced me to give it another look when I have time. > OCaml build systems usually are a mess of makefiles or autohell VERY true. OCamlMakefile (http://www.ocaml.info/ocaml_sources/ocaml-make-6.28.1/README) helps, somewhat. > In terms of community I think that both languages are about equal. Really? I've gotten the impression that the Haskell community is larger, or at least writes quite a bit more. (And dons on #haskell is really helpful.) OTOH, OCaml seems to be more portable. Porting GHC to a new platform seems quite a bit more difficult than porting OCaml; its separation of byte- and native compilation helps considerably. (This may or may not be as important to you.) Also, OCaml doesn't need to do as many advanced things for optimization. All other things aside, I still think that Haskell is probably easier to learn if you are familiar with OCaml first (which was the original question): Haskell requires you to understand several new ideas upfront before you can do much of anything, whereas in OCaml you can pick up functional programming and how to work with the type system before learning to work with lazy evaluation and monads / purity. (You can also use monads in OCaml, Scheme, etc., of course.) |