[gnuvince]

I'm still waiting for the day when I can readily recommend OCaml to people. It's a very nice language, supports functional, imperative and OO programming, has all the nice goodies that PL people want (sum types, parametric polymorphism, GADTs), while not being completely alien as Haskell can sometimes be to people coming from a more traditional background.

What OCaml lacks, is a more modern implementation; I hear that the company OCamlPro are currently implementing a per-task GC strategy to allow for better multi-programming, there are alternatives to the rather minimalist standard library (Jane Street Core and Batteries Included), OPAM is poised to become the de factor OCaml package manager. I'm still hoping that built-in Unicode support will become a reality as well.

[lucian1900]

The ML family is indeed interesting. No crazy syntax, many useful features shared with Haskell and they're strict, so easier to learn overall.

If OCaml gets better parallelism, it'll rival F# in usefulness, but without the annoying VM.