[kthielen]

This piece focuses on complaints about ocaml, and the last half seems to just be syntax complaints (which I mostly ignore just because every language seems to have awkwardness in its syntax -- certainly Haskell, a language otherwise held up as an example, can be shown to accept some really weird text).

Good things about ocaml that I think should be mentioned are Hindley-Milner type inference (some might argue this, but it's a very effective system for inferring types), and also straightforward semantics (it's usually pretty easy to look at some code and make a reasonably accurate guess about what it will do on real hardware -- compare with Haskell).

I'm sympathetic toward the initial complaints here, which I also think are the most substantive. Type classes and qualified types, as in Haskell, would be very useful in ocaml/ML. The examples offered (show_of_int, show_of_double, ...) are valid, and also the related complaint that dishonestly broad types like structural equality (where runtime errors are raised for cases where the types are actually not supported) also make a compelling case for qualified types in ML.

I made this project ~10 years ago after making similar observations: https://github.com/morganstanley/hobbes

Things like structural equality and ordering are user functions here rather than magic internal definitions (e.g. equality is defined as a type class, and type class instances can deconstruct algebraic types at compile time to decide how to implement instances). But evaluation is eager by default, so it's pretty easy to reason about performance. And data structures can be persisted to files and/or shared transparently in memory with C/C++ programs without translation, also very convenient for the places where this was used. Actually we built some very big and complicated time series databases with it, used in both pre and post trade settings where ~15% of daily US equity trades happen. So I think these observations are useful and have passed through some pretty significant real tests.