[StopDisinfo910]

> By the time OCaml "catches up" the field of programming languages has moved far ahead.

Hard to reconcile with the fact that Ocaml had 90% of the features people like in Rust today twenty years ago, a module system which is still better than Haskell, and is currently implementing a full effect system.

It still pretty much ahead of every mainstream languages.

[sidkshatriya]

> a module system which is still better than Haskell

The module system though powerful is quite awkward and verbose. I personally prefer adhoc polymorphism (class/instance in Haskell, trait/implementation in Rust). That is really missed in OCaml and is likely to be missing for the next few years even though there have been (stalled) efforts like Modular implicits in the past.

Haskell and Scala seem to have many features lacking in OCaml. Some of those features are excessive I'll admit and OCaml can argue that it is more minimalistic (which is also useful).

Yes, effects are definitely a cutting edge feature in OCaml. But they are untyped which is a big limitation I would say.

TL;DR -- OCaml does many things well. It's a good language. My main point is that the language needs to speed up its pace of evolution. OCaml's lunch is being eaten up by lower level and performance oriented languages like Rust. At the higher level it is being squeezed by Lean, Haskell, Fstar etc.

[StopDisinfo910]

> The module system though powerful is quite awkward and verbose.

Deeply disagree. It’s a lot easier to use and reason about that type classes. You can use Haskell if that’s what you want anyway. I’m glade Ocaml isn’t Haskell.

> Yes, effects are definitely a cutting edge feature in OCaml. But they are untyped which is a big limitation I would say.

APersonally I think it’s an insignificant limitation for a feature existing approximately nowhere else. Anyway I think we have safely killed your initial argument that Ocaml was somehow lagging behind.